Snot, Day 3

OK, I think I know what this is about.

I have been rendered helpless. My vision is blurred, my bones are made of glass, my throat is scratchy, my body is trying to expel all fluids from every orifice (sorry), I’m cold and sweaty at the same time, I can’t eat and I can’t think. Worst of all, I can’t sing along with the radio in the car. My voice just won’t go there. This is the universe sending me a wakeup call, right? You are wasting your life, doing nothing with your abilities. Here’s how it would feel if all were taken from you. How do you like it? What if you really couldn’t think or sing?

To the universe: I get it! Please stop! I want to live! Give me back the equipment, and I’ll use it, I promise.

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Snot, Part 2

Slept about an hour last night, so woke up stupid. Am still stupid here at the office. My blog is my only friend. See no relief, as I have a metric shitload of work to do, and must attend a party as soon as I’m done here, which I probably never will be.

Having trouble refocusing between the computer screen and the paperwork. Head throbs, but can’t recall if I have taken aspirin lately. Best to take another handful.

Filled with love and longing.

I am not defeated.

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Snot

Where does all this snot come from? I have blown my nose 5,000 times since last night. I must weigh five pounds less, and my nose keeps running.

And why so many symptoms? Runny nose, headache, sore throat, backache, fever. What part of God’s Plan is this? God: You had me at headful of snot, OK? I got the message then, and I started to undergo treatment. Do you think I will forget? Is that why you are piling on?

Thanks for listening.

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Life on the Edge

I may not be at 100% this week, a shame, since I have an Important Issue to deal with in this blog pretty soon. Yesterday, as my weekend drew to a close, I caught a cold. Or maybe the flu, I don’t know. Yet. I just know that at 6:30 PM, like a revelation, I knew I was under attack. I rarely get sick, and I’m a big crybaby when it happens, so I moped around until bedtime, then conked out hours earlier than usual.

Now, here at the office, I have many pills in me, and a big box of Kleenex Extra Soft Triple-Layer Tissue With Aloe and Vitamin E. Nos Mouchoirs les plus apaisants! These petty illnesses get me in my back. I can tell it’s not an injury or a strain: My lower back is under alien attack! White corpuscles are rushing to the scene, sirens blaring, but the enemy has arrived first and there are already many casualties. Oh, the humanity!

Since I am so near death anyway, I decided to live dangerously. I pushed the “Brew” button on the office coffeemaker before I put the coffee, the filter and the basket together! You read that right. I knew I would have only eight seconds to assemble the parts and shove the basket under the dripping, scalding hot water. Failure would lead to a big, scalding mess all over the lunch room, not to mention the shame as I mopped it up. It was a tremendous risk, but, hey, that’s the kind of guy I am. Delerious and delusional.

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It’s Alive, and Stupid

I was fifty years old before I was forced to learn how to work inside a corporate environment. The Corporation slimed into my life seven years ago, by acquiring the company I work for. Suddenly, instead of working with 85 colleagues I was one of fifty thousand employees, and I had no idea for whom I was toiling (I think I am going to abandon this not ending sentences with prepositions. It’s one rule of grammar up with which I cannot put.). Their line at the time was “We like the way you guys do business, which is why we want to buy your company. Obviously we wouldn’t dream of changing anything.”

That sounded like bullshit at the time, and — surprise! — it was. I can’t say exactly who The Corporation is, because I have signed so many documents for them regarding the terms of my employment — and what I now see to be my inevitable termination — that I stopped reading them years ago. Who knows what obligations I may be under? I know some of us have cooperated with the press on a couple of investigative reports that were only marginally less sleazy than The Corporation itself, and those people were fired summarily. So I will be discreet, as that is the better part of valor (someday I’ll try to figure out what that means).

The hardest lesson I have learned it that The Corporation has only one thing on it’s mind: raising the price of the stock. Nominally we are a big-ticket retail operation. We sell expensive things to people who have to borrow money to purchase them. But in reality we exist solely for the economic aggrandizement of about fifty people, who own most of the stock.

So we do things like this: At the local office level, in order to demonstrate to Wall Street that we are proactively concerned about computer network security, we have stripped administrative access from everyone, and transferred it to Regional IT Managers, who generally don’t know their hard drives from their floppies. This “enhances” security, hardening The Corporation against hacker attacks and loss of important secret data, thus making investors breathe easier and buy more stock. Except that when someone in a local office forgets their password (and this happens at least once a week), they discover that it takes days for the overworked regional IT manager to reset their password, so they “borrow” the password of the person in the next cubicle. Naturally, this destroys all computer security as passwords are shared and bounced around, the exact opposite effect from what was intended, but that doesn’t matter — and here’s the lesson — because the investors only know about the official policy, and not what’s actually going on.

I don’t know why this frustrates me. Maybe it’s because all these corporate types are so smug and self-satisfied and well-paid, but they either don’t know or don’t care what they’re doing.

I’ve never written this stuff down before, and my thoughts are just coalescing. There will probably be more on The Corporation, and no doubt some of it will be more incisive than this, although at this time I am not expecting to achieve Joeseph Heller-level irony.

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First Post

Trying this blogging thing. Have to post something. At “work” now, but not actually working. Hey, it’s not my fault that I have gotten so good at my crummy job that I can get eight hours of work done in five hours. Still, it feels like I am getting away with something, and if anyone were to walk by my office I would try to conceal my activity.

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