A Very Warm Day In January

We got into the 60's today.  If I wasn't working, I might have got the Mustang out.  My luck, it wouldn't have started.  But I was stuck at work on a Monday, that seemed not quite so busy, perhaps because people had better things to do on a nice day like this than come to where I work.

We got our safe replaced, we have two just like the broken one, and the drilling guy took the guts from the money safe and put it into the other safe.  I also overheard him apologizing to my coworker who is one of the finest men to have ever walked this earth.  I know he had been upset by this, he had said so and I know how something like that can eat at you when you are unfairly and unjustly accused of something.  His weekend was ruined but not being able to eat or sleep and he thought of it constantly.  I hope he feels better now.  I guess the boss went to bat for him, which makes me loathe the boss a lot less.

I still have no date for starting at the new job.  It has been two weeks since I officially said I'd go, although I decided three days before that.  It sounds like they are still half-heartedly trying to keep Low Man here, they told her the people at the new place would make her cry.  We were all "What the ?" on that one.

Saturday I rolled out of bed and got on the internet.  My home page is Google on the desktop and the Google doodle was something about the 125th anniversary of the world's largest snowflake.  Clicking on the doodle brought up an article about the doodle that had more to say about Google's new privacy policy than the giant snowflake, so on to the next result, which was a Wikipedia article about weather records.  It was heavily annotated with lots of footnotes and footnote 71 was for a book called The Handy Weather Answer Book, which I promptly ordered from Amazon from a seller in Wisconsin and the book arrived today.

I spent a while being annoyed on Saturday looking for pictures of record setting snowflakes and had to admit that in 1887, there weren't a lot of cameras around so it should be no surprise that no pictures were taken of the 15 inchers that fell on Ft. Keough in Montana, near Miles City, on January 28, 1887.

If 15 inch snowflakes fell today, there would be loads of YouTube videos of it and people would say moronic things in them and at least one would get songified and end up on my iPod the way the Bed Intruder Song the the Nascar Prayer Song did.

The Love That Dies Untold

The safe was finally opened today around 11:00 and other problems were solved throughout the day which seemed to get better and better and things looked awesome and hopeful.

While I was making some copies, I fiddled with The Book Of Answers.  We had played with this a few days ago.  It's a thick little orange book with Ouija symbols on it and you are supposed to hold it and ask your question and rifle the pages a few times and then open it up to a page and there's your answer.  I asked it if I was doing the right thing by transferring and if I should tell my Dad I am gay.  I got "Take More Time To Decide" for both questions.  Well, I had already decided to transfer and have never been anxious to have that conversation any way.  Some other questions brought nonsensical answers and I put it back in the copy room.

Today, I decided to ask if she ever loved me and if she loved me still.  A negative is what I need to hear, even if yes is the answer to the first question.  I know, it was probably a bad idea to ask both questions at once but I'm busy and just taking a moment while waiting for the copies and totally hadn't planned to play with the book again.  The book said "It Is Certain."  Which put me somewhere between "As If!" and "I Knew It!"

And for most of the day I was too busy for the fantasies of finally getting a look at those breasts, among other things.

Near the end of the day, we got word that we are bad people who break safes by using tools and shit.  One person, who is one of the finest men to ever walk this earth, was targeted in particular and he is justifiably outraged.   The safe was closed at night and wouldn't open the next day, end of story.  Nobody forced anything or worked at it with tools.  So a tough week ended on a very low note.

Please, give me my transfer.

between the longing for love and the struggle for the legal tender

The guy came back to day and over about six hours drilled less than an inch into the safe.  He'll be back tomorrow.

I can drink a lot of beer.

Another Day

As I walked in today, one of my co-workers told me we had a "little issue".

On Saturday, they couldn't open the little safe with our money in it.

So if you wanted to do business with us, it had to be credit, debit, check or exact change.

They couldn't get anybody to come out on Saturday to work on the safe and someone came and worked on it today.  I heard occasional drilling and sometimes banging.  He did not get it open and said he would be back tomorrow and spend the better part of tomorrow drilling on it.  I hope we can close the door on the big safe to muffle the sound.

On the brighter side, they might have another person lined up to come in, so they might not be delaying my transfer all that much now.  That would be so swell.

I have had my two beers tonight, and am trying to stop there.  Should one attend AA if they are merely troubled by the extent they turn to alcohol for comfort or wait until one gets DT's when they try to stop drinking?  I always said I'd rather die than go to one of those meetings and stand up and announce I am an alcoholic.  Because I don't think I am.

locked up

I dreamed I was thrown into jail, it was a small well lit cell.  Some latches on the window were pointed out to me and I was told to not try to escape.  Once I was left alone, I was so upset, I could barely breathe.  I can't remember now what I did to get put there.

I started a Lost marathon on Netflix.  The program listing says there are 100 episodes.  So when I realized I was well past 100 episodes I wondered why they didn't list the correct number of episodes?  I was really annoyed but not so much that I couldn't breathe.

A Public Service Announcement for the US Department of State

I've been watching Lost, sort of having a marathon and I became very concerned about something.  Claire's baby needs a proper birth certificate, or he will never be able to get a passport.  I haven't watched to the end of the show yet, so I don't know if Kate tried to take care of this when she was home with him, posing as his mother but probably not.

What he would need is a certificate or maybe it's an affidavit, concerning his birth abroad.  While it was Kate who delivered him, I would think it is reasonable to say Jack was the attending physician, even though he was busy trying amputate a dying man's leg while the birth was in progress.  Since the island isn't really associated with any country, I imagine baby Aaron is in for a tough time getting his identity papers together.  If his mom was Australian, I guess that would make him Australian, unless Kate could pass him off as her own and make him American.

Assuming he is going to be American, he could go to travel.state.gov and figure out what he needs to do, because that site is very user friendly.  I recall a public service announcement that showed Uncle Sam in a hot tub with a bunch of people and one of the things he told them was that if the needed a passport, they should go to travel.state.gov to see what they needed to do.

We had another bad afternoon and I told Low Man another thing we wouldn't have to deal with at our new jobs- children.  Where we are going there won't be any children.  We also think there probably won't be any cell phones allowed there, we didn't see anyone yakking on one while we were there.

My laptop was shut off when I got home, I think from overheating since I hadn't left it on the Belkin fan.  It was getting hot and shutting off when I watched YouTube and FetLife videos, but now it's may have shut off from just sitting there.  That would be a good excuse to get a new laptop, right?

Delays

My boss indicated it might take as long as a month for me to get out of here.  Low Man on the Totem Pole will probably get out sooner, leaving me in the situation I dread.

It's my opinion he is doing this to torture me, I think nothing would make him happier than to see me drop dead from a heart attack or have to be hauled away because of a nervous breakdown.

The elation I felt yesterday knowing I would be leaving soon has been replaced by the disappointment that it will not happen soon enough and what is left will be pretty bad.  I got an email that one of my help desk tickets was resolved.  There was a link in the email where you can go to a page if you need to reopen the ticket, but the page didn't work when I got there.  Because my issue was not resolved and I was not happy about this, since my customer was not happy I couldn't close out his business because of this.

Just when the system started to respond quickly to my input, someone would come back and interrupt me- I had to talk on the phone, or I had to go up front and by the time I got back, I'd be logged out and when I'd log back in, the system would respond very slowly or just randomly log me back out.


Kind of hard to be productive under those circumstances.


And most of this talking on the phone stuff is explaining State Department business.  I spend a lot of time explaining stuff to people about State Department policies and the State Department has a totally awesome web site that is very easy to use, navigate and search.  I am tired of being the State Department's bitch.  I am not a State Department employee and I do not appreciate their ever increasing fees and complexities in their rules.  That is another thing I won't have to deal with in the new job.

And up front, well, let's just don't talk about that.  Because that is why I have to leave.

But I can't resist finishing with the Stupid Person of the Day award, to the customer who asked us how to contact two of our competitors.  Could we give him their numbers?  No?  Well, where could he find those numbers?

I really got to get out of here.

Not Going to Miss That, Either

I decided to transfer to a large facility in a neighboring city.  I hadn't planned to announce it at work but pretty much as soon as I hit the door, people were saying things.  My boss had spilled the beans.  Thanks, boss.

I'll be trading a Monday-Friday daytime schedule for working 3:30-midnight with Tuesdays/Wednesdays off.  I'll be going from a two mile commute to a 40 mile one.

A coworker who is lower in seniority than me also wants to transfer and another co-worker told me she might be offered full time status after I left.  I sort of wondered if all this had been set up to get me to get out.  My paranoia kicked in.  Yup, a brilliant plan to get the fucking queer to leave.  Make her think the low man on the totem pole would leave and the queer would have to absorb all that work.

Well, yes, the absorbing-all-that-work scenario was on my mind.  And so what if it was all a ruse to get me to leave?  I am ready to go.  The duties I have here that are crushing my soul are nonexistent at the new place.  People my age, almost 55, seldom get what amounts to a fresh start.

When Low Man on The Totem Pole walked in, I told her maybe she didn't have to leave if she could make regular.  She laughed and said she didn't believe it, she was going away too, she thought she'd be better off at the new place.  And we went on to have one typical hellish day like we always do after a holiday weekend.

All through the day, every time something unpleasant happened, I'd just think "I won't miss this."  She was doing the same thing, as we compared notes together at the end of the day.

Now I just have to hope the boss doesn't mess up his part of the administrative things that will get me out of here.  I hope I get the date set so I can start counting down to the day I wait on that last customer and leave my uniform behind.

Find out where I've journeyed on the Map of Human Sexuality! Or get your own here!

Peeing on dead guys

So everyone is clutching their pearls over video released of Marines urinating on dead alleged Talibans.

I didn't set out to watch the video, golden showers aren't much my thing.  But as I read about the brouhaha, I recall a video I did see- the one where they sawed that one guy's head off with a knife.  The brutality of that man's death is the face of the enemy to me.

War is a nasty and brutal business.  We take our young men and train them to be nasty and brutal and then we are shocked when they are?  As far as I'm concerned, this was pretty tame.  Sure, it lacks class.  But I don't really know and can never comprehend what it is like for them over there.  And if a man can do something to keep himself sane and maybe come home with his mind intact and not cry in his sleep and wet his bed for the rest of his life, then it's fine with me.

That kid in the red coat

walks so slowly alone along my street about the same time I head to work.  I wonder if they dread school the way I did, except I didn't walk, I rode a bus and that had special horrors by itself.  They stopped and watched me bring my trash can up from the curb and I pretended not to notice that I was being watched.

Last night I got groceries and the hot wheels cars were full of my dream cars- the Boss Mustangs, the MINI Cooper and the Corvette Grand Sport.  I used to buy cars to donate to the cruise nights giveaways.  The same two kids were always there and always got them and I overheard one kid's dad say he had a thousand cars.  I have a Shelby Cobra hanging on the kitchen wall and have left it in it's package so far.  I am fighting the urge to buy the cars for myself.  My brother had them when we were kids, along with the orange track to run them on.  I stopped going to the cruise nights when my work schedule changed to where I was getting off work after the events started.

Friday night I am going to tag along with my co-worker who will probably be leaving.  She is being heavily courted by a large processing center and I am invited along to tour it.  I have been there for training sessions, back then they still did training.  There was a room next to the training room and it had a scale model of the processing center, showing all the conveyor belts and docks.  There were even little tractor trailers on the docks.  And yes, I did play with them.  I once had a nice little tractor trailer collection but e-bayed it away.

It will be interesting to see what is going on there and the lure of a job that doesn't involve dealing with the public is enticing.  We kept bringing up everything that wouldn't happen there.  It's getting built up into this wonderful utopia and part of me tells me it is a trick.  There is no totally awesome place to work, that place could be even a worse snake pit than the one we hope to leave.  And should the center be shut down for no good reason, as these things are wont to happen, well, Poof, There Goes Your Job.  Which I guess can happen anyway.  Heck, a change might be nice.  But it might be a bad idea to be commuting to a night job now.  If I can't get my license renewed in 2013 or if they restrict me to only driving in the daytime, that would be bad if I worked nights or had to drive 40 or 50 miles to my job.

Last night as I put the trash out, I looked up at the moon.  It was a smeary, doubled blur.  I hadn't had anything to drink, yet.  I had stopped off at the eye doctor at WalMart to ask if maybe they'd forgotten about ordering new contacts to maybe dial in some better vision for me.  But my feeling with dealing with the eye doctor and the retinal specialists is that they wish I'd go away, like same way I feel about the customers who come to me with problems that I can't fix.

I watched Office Space tonight, they talked about it at work and to my delight it was available to stream on Netflix.  I had never heard of it but it was awesome.

She's got her ticket, I think she's gonna use it

Totally got my help desk ticket number today and the very nice help desk man said no one else had reported my problem which totally makes me a special snowflake, right?  So I was going around singing "She's Got a Ticket" by Tracy Chapman unless I was singing "Love Will Keep Us Together", which is the song I sing when I do passports for families or married couples and put a sticky note on them asking the State Department to keep their applications together.

Unless love doesn't exist.  In that 1970's porno Emmanuelle, her heart is broken and she is told by some guy, her husband, I think, that love does not exist.  I was pretty horrified by that, but I thought it was probably true at the time and have pretty much believed it every since.

I'd fall in love on a regular basis, or get crushes, rather and excoriate myself for it over the years.

Yeah, she's hot.  But she's straight and married.  Just stop it already.  So I walked around with blinders on.  Don't look, you can't have it.  I didn't want a woman who looked like me.  I didn't always know the word for it, but what I wanted was a femme and I have been captivated by them my whole life.

So one breezes into my life in 2007.  It's because of work, so it's just another proximity crush and sometimes she came around when she didn't particularly have any real reason to be there and I realized one time that I had contentedly gazed into her cleavage the whole time she was there and hoped she hadn't noticed.  I was always happy to see her and I was afraid she knew it and was either revolted by it or maybe happy to take advantage of it if it made her work life easier.

One day she called and opened with "Have I told you how much I love you?"

My heart is a combination lock and she found the first number.

Click.

I believed she was teasing me, probably because of the cleavage-gazing and tried to dismiss my feelings.  She's only teasing.  She had a husband and children and she was a damn Bible thumping straight woman.  So stop it already.

A few days later, I became privy to information that the husband might be going away.  She could be free.  She could be mine.

Click.

I was in love.  Shit.  Stop it already.

I only saw her at work and I had no pretext to see her anywhere else.  I had to face reality, I had another crush that would pass in time, probably replaced by the next crush.  Stop it already.

Her divorce was going to be final in the summer of 2008, she told me so herself.  She had to stay in town for four more years until her youngest child was done with school.  I was thrilled with that knowledge.  But then she got a job somewhere else, so I didn't see her anymore.  Stop it.

I was closing down on a Saturday and a voice called my name through the dutch door.  I thought it was someone else but when I opened it, there she was.  I took her money for the after hours transaction and made a note so I could put the money in on Monday.

Before I closed the door, she said it.

"I miss you so much."

I think I said something lame like "I'll see you around."  But I am afraid the pain and confusion showed through on my face but I don't know what she meant and I didn't ask and I didn't know what to think and I definitely didn't do what I really wanted to do which is take her into my arms and kiss her really hard.  But I was at work and that's the kind of thing that can get you fired and I still liked my job, mostly, back then.

On that following Monday, I put the transaction in and put the receipt in the bottom of my drawer.  And there it stayed, my most shameful and embarrassing secret.

"There is no love, as true as the love that dies untold."

There is no love.

I told myself that this meant I needed to get out and meet people and I did.  I couldn't deny my needs and I discovered what a femme was and understood better what their power was and was pleasantly surprised to find there were women who were attracted to me although they were often in other states or even other countries.  So I bought plane tickets and crossed state lines and mostly disappointed them when I told them there was no such thing as love.

I saw her one time in a community theatre production and thought perhaps I was getting better because I was just as interested in the other women in the show, so perhaps her power was finally waning.  And I learned she had gotten remarried.  Shit.

A few months ago, I had a dream about her and in this dream she wasn't attractive any more and I wasn't in love, so I was finally free!  Hooray!

Then I went to another show.  I went on the last night and I got a seat front row, on the end.  I could see she was going to be in it, but so what.  I was not in love any more.  It would be fine.

When she first came out, the stage was dark.  She sat down on a chair on the edge of the stage, just a few feet away from me.  Even in the dark, I could see she still looked great.  And I again became just a pathetic old dyke coveting some guy's wife.

She called me at work the next week, to discuss an issue with a possible customer of hers or maybe mine and she was worried I might not know who she was, since she had remarried.  I told her I knew her new name from the show.

I didn't tell her how I had stalked her on Facebook and how my heart was twisted and broken beyond repair and how I envied her totally awesome husband.

Life went on and the receipt stayed in the bottom of the drawer along with my shameful and embarrassing secret and my summer romance went totally sideways because my heart is not just three sizes too small but totally missing, carried around in the purse of a woman who cares nothing for me or DOES SHE?!!  Did she see me sitting there in the dark, a few feet away, drinking her in?  Did she really need to call me that following week?

A few days ago I fished the receipt out of my drawer and laminated it.  I carry it around in my wallet, in my left hip pocket.  It's a picture that only I can see, of my most shameful and embarrassing secret, of a beautiful woman standing behind a dutch door, telling me she missed me.  A picture of a butch sitting in the dark, a few feet away from the most beautiful woman in the world.  The butch drinks her in and is lost forever.

Shooting holes in the bottom of the boat

It is against company policy for me to talk about my job with out first asking for permission from Headquarters first.  I know it applies to YouTube and Facebook but I am not so sure about blogs.  I used to have quite a lot of work related content on MySpace ('member MySpace?) and also here.  I got a feeling that maybe it wasn't such a good idea to be so candid and deleted most of it long ago.  So I had silenced myself long before my company did anyway.  Mostly I just tried to give people advice on how best to make use of our sometimes complex services.

I am in a sinking ship and so many seem to be gleefully shooting holes in the bottom of the boat.  I give the saboteurs dirty looks and bail for all I'm worth.  It doesn't have to be this way and something will go away for no good reason.  We are drowning in a sea of lies.

Today was frustrating.  I wasn't able to get most of my work done because some kind of update had broken something I use.  A call to the help desk wasn't all that helpful.  He sent me some information that wasn't relevant to my problem but he also said he knew there were a lot of issues with the new release but my particular problem did not seem to be listed yet.  He also said he would not want my job today.  I couldn't believe I was the first one to report this and had actually expected to hear a recording say "If you are calling because line A42 is missing, please use ticket number blah blah blah" and was surprised I got a human being to talk to after not spending all that much time on hold.

I did not get a ticket number and was told to consult someone in my district.  My district person used Netmeeting to watch me try to do my work and agreed that I had a major issue and said I should go back to the help desk and demand a ticket number.  If they decline to give me a ticket number I am supposed to ask for their supervisor.

This put me behind and burdened other people since I wasn't able to help them and I left work late.  I'll call the help desk tomorrow.

But all in all, I can't be too unhappy.  At least no one tried to kill me today.  No one shoots at me or tries to stab me.  It's not so bad.