|
|
|
dead toad omen
Monday, July 17 2023
location: rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, NY
At at least one point in the night, I'd relocated to the beanbag in the laboratory. There, as I awoke, I had a dream about a pileated woodpecker rescued from some nest situation. For whatever reason, the woodpecker had entered into an dormant phase, so I'd put him or her in a mailing tube and then forgot about him or her. When I remembered the woodpecker and dumped him or her from the tube, he or she was listless but alive, so I'd relocated him or her to a terrarium, where he or she fully recovered after a few days and flew away. In this dream, the woodpecker seemed to symbolize the cannabis seeds from various summers I'd been storing that I'd only just managed to sprout.
Over the weekend, a smartwatch had arrived that had the promise of tracking (on a map) locations using its built-in GPS functionality. I thought this might be helpful for perfecting a trail from the cabin to Lake Edward. The watch seemed well-built, but its documentation (written in Chinglish) was poor, and I was having trouble figuring out how to use the location logging feature, which was really all I cared about. Such watches are rich in stupid features designed to make couch potatoes more active, and I didn't care about any of those; for the most part they were just in my way. I tried walking up the Farm Road as far as where the Chamomile Headwaters trail starts and then back again so I could generate some GPS data, and as I walked I was marauded by a cloud of mosquitoes, which are out in force after recent rains. On the walk back, I happened to notice a big dead toad in the Farm Road. He didn't appear crushed, but when I rolled him over, he had a red injury on his belly. It was kind of an ominous sign.
Unfortunately, I found no way to recover any GPS data my watch had managed to log.
During the morning stand-up, I noticed that suddenly a new meeting had appeared in my schedule for 11:15am, and it was with Kish, the boss I never talk to (last time he set up a meeting with me was back in October, when he was notifying me of a 3% raise during a period of 9% inflation). Was I being fired? It was hard to get any context from the message or even see who exactly had been invited. Microsoft technology (under which the invitation had been sent) tried to give me context by providing a recent email. For some reason I allowed this to calm my nerves, since that message had been about an AppStream integration I'd worked on. So I looked up some information pertinent to that and also continued fucking with my stupid smart watch.
But then, as the meeting with Kish was to begin, I saw an unfamiliar African-American woman in the chat. That didn't bode well. She was probably from HR or even legal. It was looking like I really was about to be terminated. But there was nothing I could do about it now, so I waited with calm resignation. Eventually Kish appeared visually on the screen (I had my camera off) looking glum. It was now absolutely clear what was about to happen. "I have bad news," Kish began. He then said that because of (I forget how they always put it, but basically, for money reasons) my position was being eliminated, effective immediately. "Okay," I said without alarm or shock. I thought it most interesting to have that sort of reaction. Kish then quickly sequed into my severance package, which was what was making this termination very different from the one I'd had from Mercy For Animals. I would be getting a $19,000 lump sum. That sounds good, but once it's taxed (and it will be) that's less than three months of salary. The woman piped up at that point and told me that my health coverage would only last until the end of the month, which was a bit insulting. Remember, I've been working for this same company for nearly five years. Kish said I'd be communicating with the other members of my team for any details they would need from me. When I asked how we'd be communicating, he said via Teams, that my access to that system would continue through the day. In the end I told Kish and the HR lady that there were no hard feelings and that I thought the severance package was pretty good. And then the call was over. In that I had less now to lose, I was now a freer man than I had begun the day as.
I immediately told the other members of my team what had just happened, and they all reacted with enough shock and surprise that it was clear to me they hadn't been warned that this would happen (at least not directly). I was able to give them my Google email address and see their reactions. But then everything stopped. It was clear that Kish was wrong; my access to the things authenticated by my Microsoft-hosted credentials was cut-off. We later exchanged a few messages via email, but it was it.
Next I called Gretchen and told her the news. She seemed more shocked than I'd been, mostly because of how well I'd been getting along with my team. But, as I explained, this wasn't about my team. I'd stood out as the only person on that team working remotely, and if there were to be lay-offs, I stood the biggest chance of getting the axe. Gretchen said she could come home if I wanted her to. I thought about it for an instant and realized I didn't want to be alone as I dealt with the first wave of the feeling I was having. So I told her sure, if she could come home, that would be great. She got back to me and said it would take her at least an hour. So I went off with off with the dogs to run an errand: picking up an insulated pane of glass for the Brewster Street rental from the glass place on Foxhall Avenue. The Canadian wildfire smoke was back and unusually thick today, giving the world the apocalyptic look my mood called for.
Back home in Hurley, I lay on the couch in the living room with a Chromebook listlessly doing what I probably would've been doing had I still had a job: reading news stories and checking Facebook. When Gretchen arrived, she said she'd tried to get a vegan pizza from Catskill Mountain Pizza, but they'd been out of vegan cheese. So she'd gotten a couple frozen pizzas from Sunflower. The one earmarked for me was a gluten-free "supreme" pizza featuring faux sausage, red peppers, and Daiya cheese. For being gluten-free, it was pretty good. I had a void in my abdomen from the loss of my job, something I overcompensated in filling by eating three quarters of that (admittedly small) pizza.
On the plus side, I was free to do whatever I wanted to do today. So Gretchen came up with an idea for doing something that I might like: visiting P&T Surplus along the Rondout, a junk store I haven't visited in years. I thought that might actually be a good distraction, so off we drove. Along the way we pulled into the Hurley Recreational Association, an outdoor space with a baseball diamond, tennis courts, and a surprisingly-large pool. There were a fair number of kids swimming in that pool, which made sense given that it was a Monday in the middle of July. As for P&T Surplus, seeing all the same old bits of metal fasteners and computer parts (as well as a non-trivial number of obsolete laptop computers) just made me more depressed. Meanwhile Gretchen was on the phone talking to Jeff E., telling him the news of my layoff. The process of telling all our friends seemed exhausting to me, and I didn't want to have to be present for all of it.
We then tried to go to various coffee shops and even Kingston Standard Brewing Company. But there were problems that made us not want to go to numerous places. The guy who runs Blackbird Café still insists thtat customers wear masks, and we only had one mask in the car (and who wants to wear a mask in July when the pandemic is so completely over with?). As for the Rondout, it was too noisy due to refurbishing work being done on the old suspension bridge across Rondout Creek. Kingston Standard Brewing was closed, as was much of Uptown (because it was the middle of a Monday!) so we ended up at Rough Draft, the bookstore-bar-caé with the most inviting indoors of any place you might want to go. There's even a place to charge our Chevy Bolt nearby. Usually on Mondays I don't drink alcohol, though, given the circumstances, I kind of wanted a beer. But then I decided it best to deal with today's trauma completely sober so as to process and get beyond it all the more rapidly. This was what led me to order an ice coffee instead of, say, the DIPA they had on the chalkboard. We sat on a comfortable (though leather) couch and I flicked around on my phone, a little distressed that my former colleagues weren't communicating with me more. I'd been working constantly for a series of companies after being hired in early September of 2018, so my identity was wrapped up in that job. It was hard not to have to simulate presence by flicking around in Teams. And was even harder to know that my colleagues still had their jobs and I was the one who was jobless.
On the drive back home, even the front of low mountain immediately west of Hurley Mountain Road was obscured somewhat by Canadian wildfire smoke, though I couldn't smell it.
I decided not to go do any landlording at the Brewster Street rental. Instead, I took a bath in hopes of relaxing (it didn't really help) and then tried to go to bed. But then I decided to watch an episode of the Orville (one of the ways Gretchen deals with her depression), and I found it somewhat helpful. It was the episode where a female from a species of humanoids that considers females hideously repulsive serves her community as something of a Harriet Tubman to save females from forced sex-change surgery. This female reveres Dolly Parton, who eventually makes a guest appearance in a "simulator."
After I finally went to bed, my head was too full of thoughts to allow for sleep. What finally helped was getting up and taking some information I wanted to have for future reference from my Amazon Workspace (which I still had access to; indeed, I still had administrative access to all of my former employer's Amazon Web Services). I also remembered to delete my profiles from FileZilla and all my account information (including Chrome browser synchronization) from the Google Chrome on my workspace, thereby keeping people at work from possibly accessing parts of my web identity. I then began the process of cloning a plausible operating system onto an old 1TB physical hard drive. (An indication of how fragile I considered my job even a year ago was that I'd already prepared that drive for this very purpose with a copy of a suitable operating system in late May of 2022, though it seemed prudent to update it tonight.) I would have to give up my work-issued laptop, so I wanted to make sure it left my possession with the crappiest hardware configuration possible. (I'd upgraded its RAM, storage, and even replaced its old bloated batteries, all at my own expense.)
[REDACTED]
-->
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?230717 feedback
previous | next |
