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Donsplaining Wednesday, January 5 2022
We had our weekly videoconference in the tax department late this afternoon, and it was the best one ever. My boss Alex is retiring, and he didn't hold anything back about how dysfunctional and non-communicative our corporate overlords have been. There was much talk of what "vertical" I am supposed to end up in, since I'm crucial to both the importing of taxes (a tax vertical) while most of my time as been spent migrating the aging assessment software that was the foundational product of our pre-acquisition company. My thinking is that the assessment program migration is in jeopardy and that if I tie myself too closely to it, I'll be seen as an easy person to let go. So I've been stressing (in two emails to the corporate overlords but also to Marcus, the de-facto point person in our company) how essential my role is in the tax vertical, since I wrote and maintain the tax importation software. [REDACTED]
After work today, I drove the Forester out to Home Depot to get yet more plumbing for the second floor bathroom project at the cabin. While there, I also got some one-by planks for use building another medicine cabinet and for baseboard in that bathroom. I also got some more treated ten foot two by sixes for use as decking on the dock, which I won't be working on until Spring.
While in Home Depot, I was happy to see nearly everyone was wearing some sort of mask. I did see one person not wearing a mask, and, unsurprisingly, he was an older white man. Fuck that guy.
This evening my brother Don called while I was drinking a Kentucky Bourbon Barrel Ale, and I was kind of drunk by that point. We had our usual conversation, which consists of me mumbling "uh huh" as Don lectures me with facts he'd gleaned about non-modern hominids and transitional evolutionary forms (particularly early amphibians), which he insists on telling me even when I inform him that I've already been fully briefed on the matter. (The term "Donsplaining" would be useful to describe this.) Don doesn't enunciate very well, and he doesn't read very well either, so if he's telling me something he's learned from reading a book, there's a likelihood that he will utterly garble the terms and names he uses, particularly if they are long scientific words assembled from building blocks of Latin or Greek. I often have to tell him to slow down or repeat what he's just said, which usually results in him saying the same garbled word in an identical manner to how he just pronounced it. It's as if he doesn't really care that I understand. Perhaps he's just trying to prove to me (and the many other people he lectures in this way) that he really is intelligent.
Another characteristic of Don's conversational style is that he changes subjects without any sort of segue or introduction. He'll be talking about Neanderthal mandibles one moment and then switch to talking about advances in robot design (which he seems to be banking on as a way to eventually land himself a girlfriend). This further degrades my ability to follow along with what he's talking about.
Today as he was lecturing me, Don happened to drop an alarming fact into his monologue: that he had called Sara L. Kesterson today to get groceries, and she'd been out to the house. Sara Kesterson, for those who have forgotten, is the woman who used to live across Stingy Hollow Road from my childhood home, a woman whom my mother befriended and who eventually managed to extricate something like $100,000 (if not more) from my mother's accounts one IOU at a time over the course of about ten years. I told Don that this was a very serious thing and that Sara was not to be allowed anywhere near Hoagie, reminding him of all the money Kesterson had taken. Don grunted his agreement in a way that suggested he hadn't fully absorbed what I'd said. So I said it again. And again. "Never call her again," I said many times. I also got him to tell me her phone number. Fuck Sara L. Kesterson.
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