|
|
|
technolocheese control
Friday, September 7 2018
Yesterday the main problem had been that there was nobody at the workplace to give me any guidance on what to do next. Today, though, the head honcho was there, and first thing in the morning, he drew some stuff on a whiteboard that (along with access to a database server) gave me all the info I needed to proceed. The day went well, and I finally felt productive and competent in a way that I had yet to feel on this new job. I remember this feeling from the Friday of my first week at Mercy For Animals, and it's an important milestone. At one point, freakishly, the head honcho came to my desk to give me some very specific information that I just happened to have already brought up on a screen. It was as if I'd read his mind.
There isn't much planned interaction in the office. I'm not big into meetings, but I've been feeling starved of some sort of connection to my mysterious new colleagues. A couple meetings at some point during the week might've helped with that. Fortunately, today the head honcho bought pizza for everyone in the office, and that provided an opportunity for some informal interaction. I was starting to get a sense of who did what, but only vaguely, and us all sitting around a table helped to confirm some names at the very minimum. Mind you, none of the pizza was vegan, but that was not something I wanted to make an issue out of so early in my employment. So I sucked it up and ate a single slice of pizza, the one without meat on it (the other featured buffalo wings as a topping). It's good to occasionally eat real cheese just to be able to compare it to the results of new vegan cheese technologies (technolocheese?).
At the end of the day, I drove home a circuitous route that took me to the Tibetan Center thrift store, where I managed to find a few minor treasures: a 120 volt extension cord (can't have too many of those), a short USB extension cord (can't have too many of those either), a proprietary USB cable (it probably matches a camera I either have or will one day have), and a humane cage trap large enough to catch squirrels or maybe even a small cat (it was too small to catch a cute little elderly dog I met on the way to the car).
I was feeling good about the new job and how the week had gone, so I celebrated with a little Friday night drinking by myself. At the time Gretchen was out teaching her new creative writing class at Shawangunk Correctional Facility.
When Gretchen got home, she started unloading about the shit she'd gone through with Eileen, our tenant on Brewster Street. Eileen is habitually late with her rent and always has some excuse from her life for why. Gretchen was sick of it and wanted to get a new tenant. In the course of discussing this with me, Gretchen realized I was probably drunk. So she got mad at me for all the drinking she's been seeing me doing. It was the most concern about my drinking she's expressed in years. The truth of the matter was that I'd sort of violated my own drinking rules to drink tonight, so for that reason I felt like she had a point (though I didn't say so; she doesn't know what my personal drinking rules actually are). We talked about it in a fairly civil manner. I told her that she seemed to be overreacting a bit, but that I also wanted her to be happy, and so for that reason I would try to be more responsible (or infrequent) with my drinking.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?180907 feedback
previous | next |
