Oddball Update

So this morning I’m supposed to meet with this magazine guy I’m freelancing some design work for. He had a minor change to a media kit I worked up, so I burned a new CD and agreed to drop by yesterday evening after work to drop it off. He calls me a couple hours before the dropoff and tells me to show up this morning around 8:00 instead, as he’s got to go somewhere that evening. This is about the billionth time this guy has said something like that to me in the last three days, but I roll with it. I hate getting up early, friggin’ hate it, but I agree. I want to give this guy every reason to pay me the extra nice bonus he kept promising.

So this morning I drag my ass out of bed twenty minutes early. I should have made it thirty or even forty. I just do not function properly in the morning, and the earlier it gets, the worse my reaction. Stumbling around, bumping into walls, taking two or three minutes to count the time on the clock as I plan my “launch time” for the morning. Then, in the process of playing “car roulette” (getting KITT out of the driveway so I could pull my Trans Am out of the garage), I locked up KITT with my door opener inside. Had to run back into the house, get the keys, come back out, get the door opener, get in the Trans Am, shut the door, head to the magazine guy’s office. Cripes.

The traffic on our roads is suffering from a case of major suckage. After the end of “Wicked Wednesday,” Thursday traffic is supposed to be lighter. It wasn’t. The winter tourist season has just begun, and it’s worse than the last two years combined. Business owners are cheering because the economy is turning around and people are coming back down here. I’m sitting behind the wheel of my T/A cursing because it’s tripling my commute time and keeping my car’s water temperature gauge around 200° F. If anything’s going to prematurely kill my Trans Am, it’s the rush hour traffic and the horrifically mistimed (unsynchronized) lights in this town. Makes me want to get a ‘94 Corolla, beat it with a 10-pound sledge and then go to work. I’ll blend right in with the other people who actually have full-time jobs around here.

Moving right along, I decide to take a major thoroughfare through town, which I normally avoid. My usual morning route has me actually passing my workplace (as the crow flies) and then doubling back a little bit, just because those roads down there are less traveled. But since the magazine guy’s office is north of my workplace, I figure it would add too much time to the commute. I take the road through town. Big mistake. People getting on the freeway, big trucks hauling pallets of cedar chips or something, and a construction area make for a really crappy drive. The Trans Am’s plastic interior trim is squeaking and squawking, something it’s prone to doing in the morning. My nerves are fraying. It’s 8:18 AM.

Finally I get to magazine guy’s office. Park the car. Take my fistful of CD-ROMs. Go upstairs and to the door. It’s completely dark in there and the door is locked. Nobody is home.

Grumbling up a storm, I go back downstairs, get in the car, fire it up and leave. I’m about to be five minutes late for work (no big deal, though) and all for what? For NOTHING. I turn on my cell phone to see if the guy has left me a message, but he hasn’t. I go to work as usual and come in to my desk, then call the guy’s office. By this time, one of his associates has arrived. I leave a message. As I am writing this entry, I receive a call back. Magazine guy isn’t going to be available today. Somebody is coming over to my office to pick up the materials. Fine. At least I don’t have to go back out on the road right now.

So just now I’ve handed the materials to one of the guy’s associates, and all is well for the time being. The website I created for them is still on my server. But I just realized I made a colossal mistake. On my invoice I granted them net 30 payment terms (payment due within 30 days). I should have included a disclaimer that site changes will not be released to the client’s server until payment is received. Damn it. Damn it. DAMN IT. I could throttle my own self. But there’s too much shit going on to keep it all straight. Now I’ll have to make that “please pay first” request over the phone.

The fun continued well into the evening hours last night. I was over at the bikini guy’s house until nearly 8:00. We discussed all aspects of the site. What we basically decided was that the thing needs to be redesigned. Yep, the site that I nearly slit my wrists over needs to be DONE OVER. Not all of it, but enough of it to make it a major task. The good news is that the redesigned version is going to be simple, slimmed down, and ultra easy. That’s the good news. The bad news is that once I got my tired ass home, I received an e-mail from the bikini guy saying, as if it barely mattered, “Oh by the way, I’m working with a maximum budget of $500.” I realize that this means I need to finish everything this guy wants in 14.2 hours or I don’t get paid for my time. Yeah, that’s going to be real interesting. Reeeeeeal interesting indeed.

On the way home from the residence of ye olde bikini purveyor, KITT performed much better than he had earlier in the day. And, much to my surprise, the CD player suddenly started to work again. Fortunately I had my Knight Rider soundtrack CD with me, so in it went. Finally the atmosphere was complete. On my way home, a little Honda S2000 decided to get frisky with me. I have no idea why. I was barely driving the speed limit, yet this guy was romping on it in an effort to show off. We came to a stoplight, with him at the head of the line, and me right behind him. On the green, the Honda sat there for a minute, then the rear tires lit up (I could barely hear them, however, since the car is so low on torque) and the guy took off. As I began to accelerate, I heard a bunch of teenagers’ voices shouting from a car behind me: “Get him! Beat him! Go! Beat him! Beat him!”

I was not about to race a Honda S2000 in a third-gen that’s choking on excess gasoline, especially not since he was in front of me instead of beside me, but a few yards past the intersection I just got this satanic urge to floor it. I’ve never done that except during my road test on the Ohio interstate, so I dropped the hammer about two-thirds of the way down and the Formula launched. The transmission, whose shifts feel a little sloppy at low-throttle, suddenly was crisp and sharp, and the Flowmaster exhaust’s truck-like drone was gone, replaced by an all-out scream of raw V-8 power. Suddenly I was halfway down the road, right behind the Honda S2000 as he slowed down to turn into his gated community. There was a traffic light there and it turned red (typical lame-ass light timing around here) so I came to a stop again.

Whee, that was fun!

KITT’s in the garage today, as I don’t want to put anymore undue stress on the car while it’s not running properly. Meanwhile, I sit here at the office and put up with another day of great fun. I wonder what the “gimme a fucking break” moment of the day will be? Yesterday it was some dimwit client showing us a 4”x6” postcard and telling us they wanted it converted into an e-mail with “some element of Flash.” (Oh fucking Flash, how I hate thee.) Today I’ve already had a similar moment but I don’t think it was big enough to be the big moment of the day; I feel that there must be another one coming on somewhere.

One really good thing did happen yesterday, I must admit. My wife, the sweet little angel that she is, was so concerned with all the work I’ve been slamming myself with that she said she wanted to do something nice for me—which, in this case, is buy me the two PC games I’ve been anticipating most: Max Payne 2 and Call of Duty. Yay! I’ll get them in a couple of weekends, while we’re vacationing for the holidays. That’s going to be a fun time. My thanks go out to Mrs. Oddball for being such a darling!

Hehe…I was hoping to catch more of Jack McCoy’s antics yesterday evening at dinner, but I turned on TNT and what should I see but that horrific wench J. Lo prancing around like a complete idiot in a police officer’s uniform on some stupid movie they were showing. I swear to Christ, I have never seen a human being look so unnatural in an outfit as J. Lo looked in a police uniform. No Law & Order for me. I don’t even remember what I ended up watching instead. I think eventually I settled on a rerun of In The Heat of the Night, but in fifteen minutes not one interesting thing happened, so I turned it off.

By the way, what exactly is the fascination with Paris and What’s-Her-Face Hilton, those two ugly slutbags who walk around like two living, breathing pairs of spreadeagled legs and get coddled with more media attention than the President of the United States? My wife explained to me that they’re famous because they’re Hiltons. I guess I realized that, but to me that isn’t even close to being a reason why they’re featured for at least five minutes in every episode of Entertainment Tonight. Is the Hilton family known for its entertainers? Uh, no…they built a hotel chain. The insanity doesn’t stop with the Hiltons, though…now I hear Jessica Simpson, that living example of a cranial wind tunnel, is getting her own TV sit-com. What do I have to do to get a TV sit-com? Fart in public? Go to the grocery store and ask if “Chicken of the Sea” is really chicken or tuna? Throw my clothes onto the floor of my house and not clean them up for a year? That would put me at about the same level of usefulness as Ms. Simpson. I’m sure there are plenty of other people already doing this. Why don’t they have TV shows? (Wait…forget I asked that. I might turn on the TV and see them on it.)

More and more these days, American society is enthralled with people who are famous just because they are famous. No one know what they did to become famous, but it’s their existing fame that allows it to continue. It’s like a self-renewing energy source. It’s gotten so ridiculous now, the next trend will be the American people picking some guy’s name out of the phone book and treating him like a celebrity for no reason, until they get sick of him a year later and pick somebody else. We’re already halfway there—reality TV has brought us to that brink. Watching TV these days is really just an exercise in inducing vomiting. Which is why I keep watching old stuff like Knight Rider and Law & Order so I can at least pretend that the media in America isn’t focused on making celebrities out of ass-scratching winos who need a shave and a detox course.

Well, this is really turning into an all-out, rant-filled, extra-long update from hell, so I’m going to cap it off now and get back to…hum…”work.” Should be an exciting day. Oh look, there’s the CEO standing behind the dude in the cube next to me. I swear to God, you’ve never seen a man who acted and sounded closer to Bill Lumberg in your life. Go away, Lumberg. Go bang Jennifer Aniston.

Categorized as Rants