nothing pisses me off more than mundane annoyances (g2)

During this time, I was hoping the only stress I would be suffering would be gaining mastery of my new job now that I’m solo.

I never seem to get off that easily.

We’re still immersed in summer, which can only be summed up as funky, wet stank. So of course, our AC at home has been hit by lightning.

Then, as Spawn is starting school online, I have a neighbor who decided to play with a chainsaw and tear up some wires along the way.

Problem 1 is denied by the warranty company as an act of God, coverage denied. Fine, I have insurance but I need something in writing as to the problem so they can move forward.

The only thing they send me in writing is some bullshit that the AC wasn’t working before the contract in effect. Excuse me, what the fuck?

I don’t know about the rest of you, maybe it’s because I have no one to allocate some of the bullshit of life too…but I have gone beyond my limit of the incompetence, fraud, swindling, lying, cheating and all out fuckery that corporate America calls “customer service.”

What I’m saying is I want to burn this fucking company to the ground and the idiot handling my case with it.

Its now been almost a month of stank heat and suffering. I had to break down to buy a portable unit to make at least Spawn’s days less like hell. Their the ones suffering the most being at home all day.

Problem 2 is the internet. We didn’t know when we moved in we had a dickhead next door, didn’t notice his tiny penis, big truck, “trespassers will be shot” sign nor the fenced in German Shepard right next to the closest pole for both power and internet. It took four visits and a supervisor call to finally get one of those technical badasses who sees every problem as having a solution.

Now that Chainsaw Charlie is on the scene, we’re back to square one and already had one visit from technician ThumbUpHisAss who blew it off and said to call when the construction was done. What construction, you lazy fuck?

There are so many people out of work, why must dead weight hinder progress from those who can and will do? While those who won’t just waste time and space?

So being able to write means sitting in almost 90 degree room with no internet and no breeze. The storms are still going and I am so pissed I could really make a long list of people I’d love to hurt. I have zero empathy anymore and have lost my faith in karma.

When you’re the common man, the one who has never had the power of a retainer, or even a little bit of influence against large overbloated corporations who believe sending mass amounts of survey links asking to rate their customer service instead of actually providing any, what do you do?

In the grand scheme of things, I know my bitching is petty but at the same time, why does this little shit, this insignificant crap have to be blown to immense proportions just to get basic fucking common sense out these greedy sacks of shit? Provide the service you claim to do, that’s all!

With that in mind, I guess it’s really no wonder why no one can figure out how viruses work or why masks are essential or just even, wash your fucking hands?

We cannot even extend common decency and fairness when paid to.

diet vanilla yogurt (g2)

OK, so first impressions… I will never make any real close personal friendships here. At all. This job is in a very tiny town, owned by a very large family …

can you start tomorrow? (g2)

I have been registered with one recruitment firm for over ten years. They are supposedly experts in my particular field. In those ten years, I’d yet to be sent on …

i wanna be a ninja, until i tried it (g2)

My state is desperately trying to get things back to the old version of normal. It’s been fighting to embrace how not to spread disease while reopening the workforce. Needless …

what’s your greatest achievement? (g2)

I tend to feel like this is a loaded question. It seems asinine if I say AND if I don’t say, my children, for example. Saying Spawn is my achievement …

manners go a long way… even digitally (g2)

So with the job hunt going from nonexistent to downright ridiculous (18 – I counted – different companies contacting me about the single position that I fit the bill for, …

i can’t breathe (g2)

Yeah, you knew this was coming. The sad thing we all knew it was coming. Its the ones we do not hear about that worry me most, but we don’t …

what’s really valued? (g2)

I fear that the intelligence will lose to the commerce. That those who know its too soon to return back to work will be hazed as slackers not doing their …

“survival” (g2)

Understand
that nothing is
fully guaranteed

but as the elevator
is falling
don’t for the love
of God

hold onto anything
but jump up

and down like crazy

and hope
that with luck
when it lands
you’ll be caught

up in the air
alive and well
saved in the blessed

space between
the ceiling
and the floor

–Chuck Sullivan

Quote · July 1, 2020June 29, 2020 · Leave a comment ·

you really have to hate your home life to want to rage kill to leave it (g2)

I try to stay somewhat up on current events, especially considering they are so badly affecting my livelihood. Though by the time this is posted, this is probably history, but …

sometimes you have to burrow (g2)

I have barely spoken to a soul in the last couple years. I find it troublesome when I get the feeling from a new person that they wish to spark …

so my asshole friend got me into fish (g2)

My former co-worker and friend brought a betta to work not long after I started. I thought the idea was stupid as fuck… why in god’s name would you bring …

i really need stop thinking heavy shit while driving (g2)

So I’m driving one very bland day with nothing whatsoever striking to catch my attention, listening to a CD Spawn selected that I have really been enjoying and letting my mind wander.

I’m not sure why my head seems to want to direct my thoughts to heavy shit when my emotional stability isn’t very much under my control, but with one of the most bigoted, sexist, racist, fuckheads that has ever walked the planet now swathed in the title of “Mr. President”, I cannot help but wonder what the hell is happening to our society, especially when I’m bombarded with the amount of stupid shit he does every day.

The job of reporter in the US is no longer about getting to the “truth” and backing it up with sound researched information, it is now bought and paid for by a corporate agenda. And that applies to all of them now, even NY Times has fallen to the bullshit.

In order for the average US citizen to find truth, you have to look to comedy or foreign news. Yes, I said comedy. Because it is the last frontier where if you wanted to suck up to the GOP or a corporate sponsorship, you’d get booed off the stage before you could finish a set.  We know when we’re being fed shit in comedy, not so much when they call it “news.”

Crime is at an all time low, and is still dropping drastically, but no one ever hears about it. The wage gap still exists, but there are plenty of pseudoscience trying to convince you it isn’t. I see the invoices, every temp company we go through has at LEAST a 2-3 buck an hour disparagement between the guy and the girl hired to do the same fucking thing. Even one of my more intelligent and fair minded coworkers sincerely believes it doesn’t exist.

However, I found my thoughts not landing on these things, so much as race.

When people talk about the way the legal system is skewed to keep minorities in jail, they mean things like this… In this country, cocaine is mostly a white consumed drug (who besides lawyers or those who can keep one on retainer can afford it anyway?) Crack, being cocaine’s inbred  diluted cousin, is a mostly minority consumed drug because it is cheaper and markets to a lower income bracket. The max time a person can spend in jail for crack is almost twice what a person with cocaine would have to serve and they don’t have to carry much to get the book thrown at them.

I live in the South. Born here. Raised here. Went to a school that was about 60% black and completely freaked out when I moved to the midwest for several years and saw almost none.  It’s a real culture shock when you’re used to seeing more colors and shades in your crayola box of life and become suddenly surrounded with many shades of nothing put pink instead.

The black culture, despite or perhaps TO spite the horrific origin, have enhanced the culture in our area of the map in ways not seen anywhere else. I cannot imagine life without the blues, Creole, small pockets of held out languages, hoodoo, superstitions, or voodoo. The fierce defiance in spite of a calm facade is, to me, the mark of black culture. The passion for religion, music, family and vast support for one another.  The pride in spite of years of putting up with epic bullshit.

There’s just nothing like it.

Then I think about now when we have people who feel that since they got their white piece of shit in office, are now welcome, if not encourage, to come out and say whatever hate speech they want and they are somehow among kin. The next step being taking action? doing whatever they want without the risk of consequence, at most? For those that visit that link, fuck you CNN for just naming the victim and not billboarding the mf’ers names who actually DID the crime! Shawn Berry, Lawrence Russell Brewer, and John King, fucking die.

Those are the faces of a Trump supporter.

I think of Sandra Bland and how they ruled it “suicide” and alluded to “mental health,” as being part of her problem…if I was thrown in jail over a fucking traffic violation, you can call it “mental health” all you want, but I’d be ready to stab a bitch. I sure as shit would be making notes of badge numbers and calling any loudmouth I could to make as much noise about it as I could. On the slim chance she did really take her own life, which I don’t believe, can you blame her? After being treated like that? She’s probably put up with it her whole life.

I think of the cops that are mandatory now on school premises. Then I’m stunned when I’m trying to find the link to the ONE instance I know of, to find out abuse by cop towards CHILDREN is getting massively fucking common. The only difference between the American schools and the prison system is the latter gets a better lunch and a real recess.

This isn’t an isolated incident and it happens in a million subtle ways every single day. I go into a store where a group of minority kids are lingering near the door, chatting and laughing and just being, well kids. As i approach, they talk suddenly ceases. I can see the fear in their faces that I’m going to somehow cinch up my bags, or cross the street, or say something offensive. They brace for it. How fucked up is that? I don’t blame them in the slightest, I know why, it just kills me to still see it now.

Missing children organizations are less likely to give ideal exposure to minority children, the excuse being that too many children being posted would dilute the sense of urgency among the community. Then fix the system so it notifies those in the area, you dumbasses, keep it relevant to the people in the region they disappeared in, then move out as needed I was nowhere near the Jon-Benet Ramsey story, did I really need her face thrust in mine every day? There’s a couple thousand miles of impossibility going on there.

When they talk about the wage gap as being about 80%, they are referring to the people in office jobs like I am, but what they don’t go over is that that when you add the minority element or just compare those in service industries, that gap can be as bad as 50%. It’s no wonder that so many minority mothers have to work multiple jobs to make ends meet.

I even thought about how the Women’s March had a great message and sure, it’s a great cause and its kind of sad when half the population of a country kind of hates its new leader. But it didn’t represent women at all well, and here’s the problem…The women who had to go to job 2 or 3, the ones most bitterly affected by the disparagement, cannot afford to show up for fear of losing their livelihood. So there is a huge chunk of women who just couldn’t come, and they are the most needed.

The ones most heavily affected by racial and sexist bullshit don’t even have the time and energy to complain. Few are in positions where they can take vacation time or make up the time later because the system is rigged to keep them oppressed. They could be fired for not going above and beyond the expectations of their minimum wage overlords. I’m looking at you, Wal-Mart.

Then my mind wandered to the young mixed race couple who had twins not so long ago, one pale and blonde, the other more of a mocha with eyes like onyx. Both identical otherwise, both adorable. If gives me a lot of hope to read, years later, they don’t deal with racial prejudice. Then I remember. Thankfully, they aren’t American.

Otherwise, one of them was going to be privy to “the talk.”

The talk where a minority parent has to sit down and explain to their minority child to never get visibly hostile, especially in the face of “authority” because doing so might get you killed. No matter how badly you’re being treated or baited into becoming violent, don’t do it, because cops, teachers, principals, the law, and anyone of non-color could very well be out to get you, to make you a monster. To use you as an example to keep oppression and racism alive and well

.And the thought of that cherub face having to be told that the world has a deep-seeded and irrationally violent fear of her for no other reason than by the color of her skin just hit me so hard I started sobbing to the point where I nearly had to pull over to get it all out.

I spent most of the day trying not to think about it because my eyes were sore and I know Spawn was wondering if I was getting sick and I really really didn’t want to have to go into it for fear I’d be rendered unable to speak. Nothing upsets a kid more than a parent being upset, I’ve found. Even if the reason for it should upset the hell out of everyone.

At a time when we WERE showing so much promise, so much evolution to our own thinking by FINALLY electing not based on  color, but intelligence, stoicism, wisdom… and then going this… the complete opposite of the ideal of unity, equality, fairness, kindness…. I cannot help but wonder how bad this period of backsliding has to get before we’ve just had enough.

the hippy’s pornstar (g2)

The Hippy and I bonded a lot as two divorced people who had also been thrown into an initially unwanted and thoroughly unplanned parenthood. Don’t get the wrong idea, there …

a bit about the hippy (g2)

I haven’t really gone into this since I got sidetracked with anger.

The Hippy, who I met through Yankee Heather, works in another department from mine. One in which I rely on to get what I need done, but I get ultra busy and they do too so our ability to interact on topics outside of things we both need from one another tends to be minimal, It makes for a lot of misconceptions about one another when you’re not able to have a conversation with someone you work with so you can get a sense of their personality.

It’s not that I don’t have friendships with people in the department, but they’ve been slowly built over the years.

I had to laugh when The Hippy and I were sharing our first impressions of one another. I was hated and found terrifying and she was so glad I was the exact opposite, though she said a lot of that negative impression had to do with one particular member of her team who has a tendency to project a lot of their internal turmoil on others. It didn’t shock me. I probably would have been more impressed if the opposite were true.

Their team is run by a very tiny little woman who takes no shit and is swift and thorough and somewhat terrifying in her own right, and in that team are at least two who see enemies everywhere, one worse than the other.

One gave me the first impression of “elitist bitch” (this was the culprit) but kind of came off her pedestal over the years, while the other was just prone to being defensive. I once told them “I’ve never learned shit by getting it right the first time” when they messed something up and I was showing them how to fix it, and we’ve been vastly better ever since.

I told The Hippy I’d thought she was awesome the first time I’d met her. She’s laid back, but not lazy, expedient, you only had to point out an error once, she’s personable, intelligent, attentive and curious. She has a similar talent as G-uno in that you become fast friends and she can see right through a lot of shit…except when she has her own emotional investment in the view, I guess. That’s a hard one for all of us, I would venture.

Her and her boyfriend have known each other a long time as friends, went their separate ways for a while, she had been married and divorced once already. an abusive situation, and the prospect of doing it again was terrifying to her. They crossed paths again in the aftermath of bad relationships and just sparked intensely.

Seriously, not once when I met these two outside of work could they ever be on time because they couldn’t keep their hands off one another.

Apparently, I’m at that age where, although I still find it mildly revolting, I also find it adorable in its own right. I always expected to be too curmudgeonly for that shit.

The Hippy recently found out she was pregnant. For all the years she declared to never want kids, when faced with the very real possibility of having one upon her, even with all the fear, she realized was excited about the idea. Especially considering she’d been told she’d never have any.

While she toyed with the idea of an abortion and if they were ready to be parents, when asking for his honest opinion, her boyfriend stuck to his “no kids” sentiment, while at the same time increasing his retirement investment, pouring over his budget, laid out when they should move into a bigger place,  and planned out how to fast track himself into a promotion.

It took a while for him to finally admit he really did want this child, but didn’t want to put any pressure on her to have it if she didn’t want it. So she was afraid to tell him she wanted to keep it because of how she felt before finding out she was pregnant, and he didn’t want to tell her he wanted the child because of…. shit….

aw fuck, it all make me want to beat the hell out of both of them from the nausea.

 

office sharing gripes (g2)

I would imagine most of us either do or did share space with our co-workers at some point in our lives. I like to think of myself as pretty lenient, but then don’t we all?

I don’t care if you have fish for lunch and eat at your desk. If you blow your nose, I won’t even notice. If you’re loud as shit, it won’t bug me unless I’m on the phone too and I can’t hear because of you. If the background noise annoys me, that’s what earbuds are for.

For the most part, I like most of my co-workers. When I don’t, I have very little to do with them and keep it strictly business and as thoroughly documented as I can and I can count on one hand (disproportionate to the number of posts in which I may bitch about them. I inflict it on you guys so I don’t inflict it at work, in case you didn’t know) those I truly dislike and most of that is just, I don’t trust them. Otherwise, I barely recall they are there.

I’m kind of dismissive like that, I really get annoyed with myself for letting anyone bug me for too long.

However, since I live in the butt-crack of Satan’s ass that is the South, and we only have three seasons, well two really… Summer, or “hey, let’s see if people can physically stew at 115 with 98% humidity”, and some bland lowered volume version of summer that fosters mass bug breeding and plant sexing with the occasional unseasonal freakish freeze just to keep us all guessing and justifies the whopping six snowplows the entire state owns….

The weather is a personal hell for me.

I would ideally have my house at 69 degrees fahrenheit all the time and have begun to miss the office I had years ago in which my two immediate neighbors were going through menopause.

Even though I was born and raised here, I’ve never been ok with outdoors. I thought I simply hated all outdoor activities until I moved to the northwest and found out outside could be really damn cool, without mass underbrush and feeding an entire legion of ticks in under ten minutes. When I found out roaches just couldn’t survive the northwest weather, I was convinced this is what utopia must be like.

I got close enough to a moose to slap it in the face… if I stood on my car.

Those damn things are huge.

Now I share an office where most of the people are on dumbfuck starvation diets or they have the blood density of ice water and while I’m coping at 73 degrees, they want to “bump it up” to “knock of the chill.”

Go eat a fucking twinkie!

My current office is not cramped, but its only just big enough for the people in it and one in particular thinks that she is completely justified in planting a heater under her desk with a thermal blanket and a heating pad. It’s 80 degrees outside right now and its going up every day. Ironic, since this is also Yankee Heather…. from the North…. where it fucking snows….

Her boss is the one on the craptastic long term low-cal and massively unhealthy diet. Not surprising where her mood swings really stem from.

The others do get chilly from time to time, one piles under a blanket, we think she’s sick and just refuses to go to the doctor, another has a light sweater. But I still wonder…

What the fuck is wrong with all of you?!? Go outside until you sweat your ass off, until your shirt sticks enough to qualify for a bar contest since sweat doesn’t work here, but don’t subject the rest of society with your complete inability to insulate against anything!

RaWr!!!

I haven’t lived in the northwest in over ten years, but I miss it when summer hits here. I crawl inside and kill my a/c because I don’t want to remember where I live until it becomes bearable again… for a couple months.

So for those of you who have ever had to share space with a co-worker(s), was your biggest pet peeves?

i feel fine… (g2)

Somewhere near the end of the year, with the doom of Thanksgiving and Christmas looming, I got a wild streak to basically throw everything out and scrub it all down with bleach.

Sometimes, I wish I could do this with my brain.

The Yankee is steadily showing herself to be more of a Heather. The Hippy, who has stuck up for her for the longest time  suddenly said one afternoon after work “Put some distance from her, for your own sake.” She didn’t elaborate and at the time, I didn’t feel I needed to ask. I kind of got the gist.

God, I’m too old for this shit.

The Yankee made a shit first impression from the get go. You don’t move to the South, shit on southern education (which you’ve never personally experienced) for which most of your co-workers are by-products of.

You don’t go off about how your Master’s degree should exempt you from doing shitty work, like my job. Especially not if you keep reminding me what you do when I catch your bullshit mistakes in the process of doing my own job. If you don’t want me to catch your mistakes, stop making them.

I also have to appreciate the irony of me, the southerner, having to explain to said Yankee that making remarks like “only some blacks actually fall under the N word” is indeed a racist statement. For someone whose boyfriend likes to reiterate they won “the war,” his girlfriend doesn’t seem to understand what that means.

Perhaps its because I cannot pour bleach on her to flush her away that I felt the need to purge my world. We’ve made several trips to Goodwill. Spawn still has some stuffed animals to cover. What idiot bought this kid this many toys?

I finally dismantled the bed and took it to my co-worker who lost so much when we had the storms and flooding.

It felt good. I even tossed the curtains that had been hanging since Spawn was a baby and bought new ones I really couldn’t afford but my sense of well being couldn’t afford me not to. I’m pretty sure I won’t be taking them with me if I move, but I feel better and more refreshed in my home now. Spawn was unusually supportive and worked with me as I went. Maybe I wasn’t the only one needing to purge.

Of course, when the bulk of it was done and there was almost an echo in the house, my instinct is seeking out anything else to eliminate, measuring out what I can break down to nothing as keep worthy, while Spawn’s response was to point how little clothing they had left that actually fit.

Damn.

i don’t want to go in the cart…(g2)

I believe in an earlier post I described  socializing with the Yankee, and getting to know the Hippy. the Hippy and I especially have been bonding a great deal. Hippy was rather distracted and irritable during our stellar Excel class, more so than the exemplary education we were receiving could be causing, so we teased her quite a bit about the possibility of her being pregnant, no less due to the extremely picky and insatiable appetite she had going on the entire day. Hippy even mentioned at one point she’d name it after me with a “McDickface” in there somewhere if that happened to be the case.

Hippy lives with her boyfriend of a couple years. I met him, we bonded in the younger brother from another mother kind of way. He was a great guy and I liked him a lot, saw a lot of myself in him and by extension, I saw a lot of immaturity as well. He’s gruff, brusque, tough fronted, but when Hippy turns her head, his expression changes to something very tender. She has often started using me as her boyfriend interpreter.

They’ve known one another since high school, when he was dating a friend of hers. Of course, he tries very hard to minimize the importance of that relationship whenever it comes up with the Hippy, but she knows better and doesn’t let it bug her as it once did. the friend cheated, time went on, and now the friend gets to watch their facebook posts as their life together progresses. Things turn out odd in life.

Spawn’s other parent was an attendee at my wedding. Life has a twisted sense of humor.

So Hippy is pregnant.

They’re not married, had no current plans on even discussing it any time soon as they’ve had a pretty shaky but stabilizing beginning and have now been suddenly thrown into parenthood.

This is pretty much how Spawn came to pass, only when their presence was discovered, I was long over the relationship and had tossed the other contributor out.

I, of course, was a model of decorum when she gave us the news and almost fell on the floor from laughing. I also demanded she agree to keep the name she’d threatened to bless it with in my honor.

i’m getting better… (g2)

I’m trying desperately to catch up with all the items I’ve missed, I have been simply incapable of sitting down for even ten minutes and reading anything. I don’t know why.

Antsy, irritable might all begin to describe me, but mostly I just wanted to cut off everything. I lost my phone, it went dead for days at a time. I worked like an automaton and treated people much the same. I came home with only thoughts of hunger, then exhaustion.

I moved one day to the next with checklists in my head, no love or desire for anything.

I would say that under normal circumstances this would be the period when I would slide into the abyss of depression for a bit, go back on the meds, work the steps that pull me back out of it. Like accepting every 8th invitation whether I want to or not, for example, which is the only reason I had any interaction with the Yankee outside of work, pleasant as the experience was to my surprise.

I suppose having a kid is kind of a motivator for me to push away the darkness more strongly than I might otherwise. Considering we only have one another, we talk daily, we discuss everything, it tends to keep me more grounded and tethered to something. I realize this doesn’t work for everyone and I’m certainly not belittling that in any way when family has no effect on your darkness when it comes to call, but my kid is very much my totem.

In moments when I would otherwise not be able to stop it from pulling me under, I have the half-pint who reminds me why I’m not done fighting today. Maybe tomorrow. Or, maybe the day after.

For my G-uno, I was the one who brought the dysfunctional in-laws into my marriage. I never knew what a family could be like until I met my ex’s family. I’m still very connected to them, just as I’m very disconnected from my own. It is extremely painful to not be loved and accepted within your own family and to know that in every subtext of how they speak to you.

To be able to walk away from that, know them to be the poisonous element and still have faith in your own self as being a good person and not seeing yourself through their eyes, takes a strength a person just shouldn’t have to bear with people supposedly under the title of “loved ones.” My made family, the family I built from my teens on, G-uno and BFG very much included, shaped a lot of who I am today, gave me the strength to fight against a very twisted guardian and their brood.

We feel compelled to try to make and fix things. You and I especially like to fix. Maybe it is a Gemini thing.

But I will never be able to fix the person my gran made me out to be to their family, a spoiled and greedy orphan never satisfied with anything received and working poor gran’s fingers to the bone demanding more. This spilled over to my aunt and uncles and poisoned the mind of my cousin and his wife. They will always have that haughty smugness when I spend time with them that I don’t measure up enough to have been “gran’s favorite”.

I already knew that. I spent a great amount of effort trying not to be, repeatedly kicking that fucking pedestal anytime I saw it coming closer. To be in gran’s good graces would mean I was like them. That was the last thing I ever wanted to be.

I had an epiphany recently. I knew I married another version of gran, so I could have the same bullshit fights with different outcomes and I had to do a lot of soul searching to overcome that. But it went further than that. My ex manipulated me to be geographically isolated. Gran, being the manipulation master they were, managed to do it emotionally, mentally. They made sure I had no one in my family who saw me as I was. No one to confide in. No one. Except them.

When this hit me, I kind of wanted to dig gran up and just beat the hell out of them. It hurt, but it was their own selfishness that motivated every diabolical thing they did. They destroyed their own family, caused so much internal fighting and baseless hate that those of us generations later just want nothing to do with any of them, or one another, save for a small few.

So when a person, such as yourself, who has had nothing but selfless goals calls a lost cause a lost cause, why would you feel this in any way your fault? To be able to fix them, you’d have to think like they do, and in turn understand them, and take a risk of turning into that yourself. I couldn’t risk that, I try to carve that ability out of myself much in the way you battle the Kraken.

There is a point when self-preservation has to kick in and you have to give it up and escape. You don’t call it a bad thing if you’re not able to fight a bear with brass knuckles, its a fucking bear. You’re thankful you survived.

so the excel class blew, and apparently so does the teach (g2)

So… me, the Yankee, the Hippy and one of our other employees went to an “advanced” class on Windows Excel. I say “advanced” since I’m not sure if they just have to mention the buzzwords of “pivot table” or “vlookup” to qualify, but that was about the quality of this course. Our suspicion of exactly how bad it was going to be started when we got a good look of the picture of our instructor.

I’m not sure why this is a thing, but they are now doing courses where the instructor is remote and you have to listen to them over a conference speaker. They can see everything you do on your screen and you spend a majority of your time on mute and only interrupt with questions. Call me old fashioned, but this doesn’t appeal to me at all.

Don’t get me wrong, I see the utilitarian aspects of it. I just think it blows.

Considering the instructor’s photo looked like it was pulled right from her Tinder profile, duckface and all, she looked like she blew too.

And swallowed. A lot. And cheaply.

We spent at least another half hour trying to find a linkedin profile for her, which we found, and it too looked like yet another choice Tinder alternate, except this one was about 50 pounds heavier than the one in our faces currently.

How much lack of self-awareness do you need to think slut photos are “professional?” Why wouldn’t a boss doing their due diligence kind of guide you off a whore-ish cliff in the workplace?

Unfortunately, after the usage of “irregardless” (not a word) and “cumbersun” (cumbersome) and every cliche used backwards, I can only guess from a lack of understanding them, there was no value to be had in the instruction either.

There was not one single question posed to her that she could answer. We stepped through formulas that no person on earth would ever find useful. Most of her knowledge seemed to be based in memorization, in spite of bragging to 30+ years (how old was that fucking picture?) of Excel experience .

Though she wanted to spend a great deal of time on how to make spreadsheets “pretty.” Fuck that noise. If I want to see a pretty spreadsheet, I’ll look here:

“Cherry Blossoms of Historical Castle site” (2006)

 

Tatsuo Horiuchi | the 73-year old Excel spreadsheet artist

They requested we fill out an evaluation for the class when we were done for the day.

Bad move… no, I didn’t hold back. I kind of eviscerated her: her grammar, her Tinder pic, her lack of any real usable instruction or knowledge in the material. However, I did try to finalize it on a positive note and complemented the building, the snacks and the book…

In spite of everything, it was a nice day. The Yankee and I only got in one argument over the fact that Dunkin Donuts sucks epic shit and Krispy Kreme rules. Apparently, Northerners are all about DD for the coffee? …even though the doughnuts blow chodes. I would rather get coffee where the main element – the doughnuts –  are actually good. I don’t usually go to doughnut shops for the coffee, but hey. We finally agreed to disagree on that point.

We tried a new wing and ale place for lunch and I had an epic spinach salad with honey bacon that kicked some ass, so all in all total win of a day. Oh yeah, and it wasn’t at fucking work!