Quaking In My Booths

The 9th floor of a downtown Richmond office building is a really shitty place to be when an earthquake hits. When ours hit, the building started rocking back and forth crazily, knocking picture frames over and making it really difficult for me to drink coffee without staining my favorite shirt.

So I power-slammed my coffee and jump-started my brain into Super Action Mode, which means that my thoughts at the time went more or less like this :
Fuck. I'm going to die at work. That's one of  my worst fucking nightmares, ever, and here it is, getting ready to happen. If I'd called in sick today, I'd be alive tomorrow. This sucks.

I mean, if you are on the 9th floor of a 15 story building, what can you really do? Hiding under the desk isn't going to help much- there's nothing directly over my desk except for a few acoustic tiles and six stories of concrete, steel and glass. The acoustic tiles aren't going to hurt me and my desk isn't going to offer much protection if the building collapses on top of me.

Flee? To where? If another quake hits and the windows break, you really do not want to be on the street below. A few people could fit under the handful of vehicles scattered about, but there's no parking on most of the block and not nearly enough cars for everyone to hide under. But I didn't want to die in the middle of a goddamned archiving project either ,so I stepped out of my windowless office and into the main corridor- everyone was up and moving about, but there wasn't any real panic...until the building suddenly lurched again. It only lasted a few seconds, but it felt like forever...was it going to stop or was it going to worsen?

It stopped and a quick , not-quite-panicked consensus was reached that we should evacuate the building as if it were a fire drill.  We all made it outside to our designated gathering spot but a quick tally showed that my co-worker, an elderly woman that I refer to as 'Grim' because of her humorless adherence to The Rules, was not with us

The Rules are something I openly mock and Grim hates it when I do so, which just encourages me, I can't help it- she once called me a 'scofflaw', which was meant as an insult but actually made my day...anyway, she was missing.  I told my boss that Grim was probably standing around in helpless confusion and that someone should go back in and get her.

My Boss looked at me with eyes full of helpless confusion. He obviously didn't want to go. Great.

The tiny force of Security guards were trying get people out and handle the crowd outside, so it was not hard for me to get back in -and by that time most of the people were already outside, so it was relatively easy  to run back up the stairs against the small current of evacuees.

Sure enough, Grim was standing in the 9th floor lobby, looking lost and confused.  

What do we do?

"You come with me and we take the stairs to get outside."

But it isn't a fire. Are you sure we should evacuate the building?

"No, I'm not. But why don't we go ask the Boss? He's outside on the sidewalk waiting for us."

By the time we got out, the Boss had decided to close the office and send everyone home early, just in case we had another shock or a gas line had broken or something...I still get paid, so I applauded his safety-first attitude and went home to check out Facebook and the web news. Once the initial phone congestion cleared, I got a few calls from friends and from my brother in Chicago- I assured everyone that I was OK and that there wasn't any serious damage here.

And we all lived happily ever after.

Until the next day at work, that is. Twelve  of our  national offices have been freaking out for almost two weeks trying to comply with a Directive sent out by our National Giant-Ass Boss. After being unable to figure out how to do what they were supposed to do, several of the offices were directed to call me, since I pretty much know how to do everything. I'm not boasting, I just do...it is more curse than blessing, trust me.

Anyway, I went over the Directive and it made no sense to me- I mean, I understood what it said, but not how it applied to what we do- until I read the entire chain of emails FWD'd to me by our client. The very first email contained everything I needed to solve the problem.

So I called the National Big-Ass Boss and was a bit surprised that he answered on the second ring.

"Hi NBAB, this Allan in Richmond."

"What do you want, Allan?", he said icily. (He hates me for reasons too long to explain here.)

"I'm looking at the original  email you got from the client and I think I found out why all the offices are so far behind on the Directive you sent them."

Then he had the gall to deny knowing what I was talking about. What email?, he demanded to know. So I gave the time and date stamp,  the sending party, the CC'd parties and then read his own response to the initial email back to him. Verbatim.

"Oh. Yes, I remember now. So what is the problem with that?", he asked.

"Well, you didn't read the sender's signature line. If you had, you would have known he works for a different division than the one you sent the Directive to. The Division you sent it to can't comply, they don't handle that line of business at all. And the client deadline is tomorrow."

There was silence on the other end. I could hear veins popping in his forehead but he said nothing.

After a decade or three had passed , he said "thank you for that information" and hung up without a goodbye.

Ten minutes later a new email went out, clarifying which Division was responsible for carrying out the Directive and informing them that the deadline had been extended one week. No one in that Division was aware they even had a deadline or Directive in the first place, so what they were really being told is that they had one week to do two weeks worth of work- with no warning at all.

Shortly after that, I got a call from my Boss, asking me what I did to make the NBAB so angry.

"I told him he's an incompetent dumbass."

"You said that?"

"Well, I phrased it as a passive-aggressive attack disguised as a business call, but yeah, that is pretty much what I said."  Then I told him about the mistake I found and  conversation I had with the NBAB about that mistake.

"Wow."  That's all that he could say. He said it several more times.

"Wow."

Thing is, they can't fire me. I'm the only one who understands what I do and if I'm gone, the client has flat-out stated that the account will be closed - and I was present when the client said it.
They never should have let me hear that because I have a meeting with HQ tomorrow and it is going to be a bit hard for them to discipline me when I have a client who is that strongly on my side.

The bosses keep promising me a promotion and I keep doing the work and I get a nickel here and a dime there but no new title or salary. Really, though why should they pay me more? I'm doing the work for what they are paying now, so why spend more?

Because they have to.

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In Like A Lamb, Out Like A Texas-Sized Piece of Sharp-Horned Shit

Lately I have been feeling as if I were a small beanbag trapped inside of a pinball machine. Each morning I am catapulted  out of  the relatively cozy tunnel of my dreams and onto life's wildly uneven playing field, into a world stroboscopically lit and surrounded by cacophonous chaos, with me getting hit from all angles over and over again; thumped painfully from everywhere to nowhere, detachedly absorbing the impacts and changing shape slightly to accommodate the cumulative blows but offering little real resistance, all attention focused on a desperate attempt not to disappear into the dark hole waiting at the bottom of things.

Not that everything has been uniformly bad, just a bit fast, jarring and tilted. Stressful with Extra Balls.

Stress can hurt you. Last week my right arm started having muscle spasms that literally knocked me to the floor in blinding agony. I almost went to the ER once I was able to stand up but the pain soon settled down into a steady, constant ache and I decided to wait. In the morning I saw my doctor and he gave me a shot and some pills, including some steroids for inflammation and Valium to help take the edge off the steroid-induced mood-swings.

In hindsight, I don't think that was a very good idea, the steroids wreaked havoc with me emotionally; the Valium worked long enough for me to run a few errands and do my radio show, but by mid-afternoon a black and roiling cloud of uncomfortable misery had enveloped me and I spent the rest of the evening in a flummoxed, fumbling state of near-uselessness.  I was torn between the despair of irrevocable loneliness and the deep, dark fear that if I did have human companionship, I'd break down, collapse and suffocate them with the sheer urgency of my need to not be alone. 

At  other times I'd feel OK for a few minutes and put on my shoes, maybe open the door. I think I walked around the block once or twice just to prove that I could, but it is possible that I simply imagined doing so.

Due to some server issues, I couldn't even get my podcast to upload, which shouldn't have been enough to break me down, but was. My radio show is hard work and sometimes it feels like it is the only good thing I have to share with anyone and now some distant computer malfunction was going to cut the last pound of good flesh I had left- at that moment I felt that the collective malevolence of the Universe was funneled into a firehose and blasted straight into my face. Everything that exists, exists to torment me. Of course, in my head I knew that is utter rubbish-but when the miserables kick in, the intellect checks out.

That was a terrible feeling; it reminded me of how I used to feel when I drank. I'd often feel a desperate need to be with someone, to belong somewhere, but I didn't have anyone to be with or anywhere to go...well, that isn't entirely true. There were people who would have been glad to see me if I could have managed to sober up, but I always wound up turning my back on them and seeking the false comfort of familiar-strange drunks in familiar-strange bars. Underneath it all, I knew that I was too fucked-up to be around my real friends, but I didn't have the strength or dignity to care about what a mess I'd made of myself, so I’d usually choose the rather mercenary company of drinking partners over that of real friends-the kind of friends who might be concerned if they saw me in such a wasted state.

Anyway.

By Sunday I felt so horrible that I could barely function, every simple task seemed huge and complex and my short, comfortless naps never seemed to last long enough. I'd turn the computer on, hoping for...I don't know...something, anything that would help connect me with another person, cause or concept, but simultaneously dreading the overwhelming responsibility of communication. I had no words to write and no songs to play, yet I wanted a reader, an audience, a duet partner, a shrink -someone, anyone.

Anything I said could and would be used against me, so what to say?

What to do?

 Instead of counting sheep, I started reviewing every word I'd ever uttered and devising new and horrific ways to use them against myself.

I lay on my back all night doing this, eyes open, staring at nothing until it was time to get up and get dressed.  I lingered under the hot water, it felt really good on my aching bicep and the relief that came with it almost lulled me into thinking that  it might be a good day after all.

But as soon as I got to work, my boss really pissed me off by screwing up my paycheck and I was so strung-out on pills and no-sleep that I nearly went into a blind, terminal rage over it. I wrote him a pissy email explaining that money is the only reason that I have a job; remove it and I have no incentive to stay at work. Boss replied that it was too late to fix this payroll, but he’d make it up to me later.

Fuck that. Fuck you with a Universal Funnel, you fat officious prick.

So I powered down my computer, turned off  the lights in my cube and went home for the day. I didn't quit or say anything to anyone, I just left. Eventually my boss called and left a voicemail for me to call him "first thing in the morning".

Whatever.

My experience tells me that taking a principled stand at work is effectively the same thing as quitting, but my current job has been the exception. Our client loves me and if I'm gone a huge account gets placed at-risk, plus I'm the only employee who can understand the client's database, so firing me at this time probably wouldn't work very well. But I'm no longer satisfied at work and that bothers me, since I have to spend so much time there on account of not being naturally-born rich.

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Next: Fortune, Glorious Fortune