Thursday, September 30, 2004

Postcards From the Ledge

Best emails/comments in the past couple of days:

Benzihna suggested that I should consider a new career: "Pole dance, they make Muchos Bucks and you have a rack."

G-Force said that upon meeting a member of the opposite sex whom I might find beneath me, I should not put up with any crap. In fact, I should say: "No, you cannot touch me. You're lucky I'm letting you breathe in front of me."

The Commenter Known as Temple commented: "You are so bright and funny and wonderful." Well put, and I could not agree more.

And many thanks to my bud Catholic Packer Fan, who said of my recent... issues: "Remember, the top three stress producers in life are loss of a spouse, job change, and property damage (via natural disaster). Well, two out of three ain't bad."

join the Latutudes Chorus at: blondechampagne@hotmail.com

Tuesday, September 28, 2004

"Would you describe yourself as a 'people person'?"

I’ve had a lot of email and comments demanding a full accounting of The (Most Recent) Job Interview. Please understand that I haven't been talking about it much primarily because of the Driver’s Test Theory, which may be summarized as follows: If you don’t tell anybody you’re about to take your driver’s test, in the event of failure you are thus safeguarded against the utter humiliation of explaining to the world why you can’t triumphantly pilot your own way to the evening shift at the Dairy Queen. But if you shut your trap about the whole thing, and pass it anyway, you have earned eight whole glorious minutes of rolling up to the drive-thru window bathed in a surprise patina of station wagoned glory. It takes a whole lot of the crap out of a crapshoot.

Then again, not a soul knowing I was taking my driver’s test provided absolutely no comfort when I failed it because of some stupid rule about making a right-hand turn while in a left-hand lane. The DMV is so nitpicky.

Because I am an enormous dork, I volunteered for this guy's first Congressional campaign as a senior in high school, and also because I am an enormous dork I thought it was great fun. In those days his headquarters consisted of a tiny drywall shack behind a wallpaper store, because when you need to instill confidence in the electorate, what you want is a whole lot of little upholstery squares within easy reach. And now his headquarters is the constituent’s office in the biggest skyscraper in town, which has a whole entire mall inside, and if that is not Making It in America I don’t know what is.

The interviewer—I still don’t know what his title was; Head Minion, perhaps—talked to me for an hour and a half, which frankly is far longer than most of my major relationships with the opposite sex. Granted, an hour and twenty minutes was dedicated to (please don’t ask how we got on this topic) what it was like for his father to grow up on a diary farm in Vermont, milking cows at the buttcrack of dawn.

I assumed this was some sort of test, and so I listened carefully and also took notes (“waking up at buttcrack of dawn to milk cows=bad”) but then he started asking me about my experience, which was largely an educational moment for me, since it afforded me the opportunity to learn that when people want to know about your experience it is probably not a good idea to begin with the words “When I was in high school.”

I’m glad I went, if for the sole reason that it solved utter mystery of why these people even wanted to talk to me. I couldn’t understand it; I have absolutely no Hill experience and my most viable professional political experience consists largely of snickering whenever Ted Kennedy attempts to speak without slurring (this appeared on my resume as “participating in political roundtable discussions with major media figures.”) I figured they invited me in as a curiosity, because let’s face it, who doesn’t want to see, live and in person, a woman who conducts a phone interview in the midst of supposedly attending to her current job, a job located in a building in the midst of a hurricane evacuation.

But Head Minion kept saying, “We’re looking for someone with great depth of experience, someone who’s been out in the world and has experience with more than one industry to bring to the table.” By which he meant: “Dear District: You have elected, as your representative to the United States Congress, a person who demands, as a prerequisite for becoming his press secretary, a minimum of four month’s experience of selling roses in bars.”

All told, I think it went pretty well, if you excuse the fact that my final words to Head Minion, his very last impression of me, consisted of, “Have a great weekend!” which wouldn’t have been so bad were it not nine-thirty in the morning on a Monday.

What it comes down to is this: They’re narrowing the field to six candidates, three with a lot of legislative experience (the Not Me’s) and three with—apparently, resumes sparkling with such entries as “Sewer System Describing Hack.” In the next couple of weeks, the Congressman will decide which direction he wants to go (“What do you think, you guys? Do I hire a competent person, or somebody who went to work at a guest ranch in Colorado during college and then ran home crying after three weeks because she didn’t like the way one of the cows was looking at her?”) If he goes with the actually qualified people, I am screwed. If, however, he’s been rummaging around the lower left drawer of Senator Kennedy’s desk, it’s between me and the two other incompetents.

I think we can all learn something from this experience. It explains a great deal, for instance, about why we respect our government as an utter paragon of resourcefulness and efficiency.

Monday, September 27, 2004

"Sorry about the mess."

Flipper appeared at my doorstep on Trumping Eve.

“I come bearing hugs and coupons for ice cream,” she said.

We got Hagen Dazs, and over a four-hour period I ate the following:

-two cheeseburgers
-one arteries’ worth of French fries
-many spoonfuls of chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream
-two pina coladas
-Half a bag of Blast ‘O Butter popcorn, garnished with Kraft Cheese Topping, which is essentially the bag of orange powder used to create Kraft Macaroni and Cheese in canned form
-Furor

It was a very productive evening.

Also productive was the following Friday, for which we’d made plans to express our youthful freedom while expanding our social horizons, also known as slathering on foundation, tromping into a piano bar four minutes before the cover charge starts and sipping on $9 screwdrivers while attempting to catch the eye of vacationing insurance adjusters from Topeka. Oh, we do party, here in The Swamp.

But Flipper spent Friday rerouting cruise ships away from a Category 3 hurricane for The Mouse On Water, which for some reason made her tiiiiiiiiiiiiiered, so she needed a nap. I, however, had devoted the day to conducting important scientific experiments involving how many times I could change positions while reading in bed before needing to readjust the sheets, so I, too, needed a nap. And after she woke up, Flipper called me and she was all, “Do you really want to go out?” and I admitted that we were old now, and boring, and therefore might as well go the whole nine. Thus did we pass the evening in front of TGIF on ABC, wondering where that simply hilarious Bob Saget show went, and then we watched a documentary about the making of the Star Wars trilogy, complete with post-viewing discussion questions. So: not only did we not go out, we actually conducted a half-hour, very serious debate over why Yoda sent Luke to battle Darth Vader when it seemed that the likely outcomes were either turning to the dark side or getting sliced in half; what exactly the prophecy “bring balance to the Force” meant; and at which point in world history George Lucas officially went batshit insane and started thinking that things like Natalie Portman and revising sacred character development so that Greedo shot first were really good ideas. And then we wondered why we were alone.

However, the documentary featured forty seconds of footage featuring Harrison Ford tied to a stake (Han Solo On A Stick, coming to a county fair near you) while his head rested on a pillow, so hey. Cheaper thrill than the screwdrivers. Way cheaper than obtaining an actual social life.

Social life leaving from Docking Bay 94 at: blondechampagne@hotmail.com

Sunday, September 26, 2004

Trumped, Part II

The following post is sponsored by the Department of Be Careful What You Wish For, Because It’s Going To Happen And It Is Totally Going To Kick You In the Nuts, Assuming You Have Nuts.

So I was sitting there at the Evil Boring Day Job fulfilling my usual duties of seething and procrastinating when the interim Boss Nass shoved his head in the door.

He sat at my side chair and did not close the door.

“Unfortunately,” he said.

I smiled.

It took maybe thirty seconds. I was handed an envelope with a severance check and COBRA information.

“You’re reacting to this very well,” he said, almost disappointed that I had not experienced a meltdown at the news that forty hours a week of formatting spreadsheets had just vanished from my life.

“Yeah, you know,” I said examining my check, “it’s easy when you don’t give a rat's ass.”

Of course outside my head I phrased this as, “I’ve been expecting it. Then I added, “When does this go into effect?”

“Oh,” he said. “Today.”

Ah.

It was 3:30 in the afternoon; the office shut down at 5. He left, for the day was waning and by God there was assery to spread across the land.

Friendboy Andy IMed me. “Um, I was just fired,” I typed.

As always, Andy had exactly the right words of spiritual comfort.

“Fuckers,” said he.

I sat for a moment, reflecting on my chief concern for the immediate future, which was that I no longer had to tape the 4 PM showing of Friends on TBS, and got up to report to my now-former co-worker the fact that the entire marketing department now consisted of her.

I leaned into her doorjamb. “Michelle?”

She looked up from her computer screen, tears on her cheeks.

I closed the door. “Oh God, he told you. He told you first.”

There were tissues and many utterances of the word “bastards.” Then I went about tenderly packing up a year and a half of my life, which pretty much consisted of yanking out drawers and dumping them into boxes. Come on, Stayfree stash! Let's go, delivery menus, peanut butter crackers, Tinkerbelle notepaper. You too, extra pair of pantyhose. We’re going home.

I went back to my office one last time, tore my nameplate out of the holder in a wild fit of cliché, and sat down to my computer. The documents I had been not-working on were still open, the cursor awaiting input. I ran the Doomsday Scenario on the hard drive, wiping myself away—the desktop images of Jim the Baby Nephew, Notre Dame screensavers, all the Monster.com bookmarks. I was filling out my last timesheet when Interim Boss Nass stuck his head in and looked around the empty office.

“Well!” he said cheerfully. “You certainly made short work of that!”

I smiled again, and entered numbers very loudly.

The boxes now sit in my living room, a shocked jumble of pencil holders and manila folders and a typing stand that I totally, totally forgot belonged to the company. Two days ago I opened the dryer door to finish some laundry and found a forgotten load of wash—tank tops and skirts I’d worn to work in a previous life.

I shook them out, and put them away.

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