Oddball Update

Who am I? In the last few days, you might have gotten a different answer from me depending on when you’d asked. Between Apple and I, it feels like we’ve accomplished more in the last 48 hours than either of us usually gets done in a week. I haven’t posted anything here in a few days, so I thought I might regale you with some details of what all has happened in that span of time. Fair warning: I’m feeling a bit ranty, folks, and with a dash of unchecked tangenting at that, so this could be a lengthy entry.

The Fun Begins

It was a busy week. Apple started her new job, and I got more deeply engrossed in mine after receiving a large spate of new tasks late last Sunday. Come Friday I had cleared several things off my “to do” list at the office, but had one last thing to finish up. It’s a double-sided, letter-sized marketing document that explains what we do as a company, in simple terms. Since I’m starting a grueling new multi-week assignment tomorrow that’s quite possibly the most important thing I’ll do for my company all year, I decided that I’d wrap up that marketing document on Saturday, then spend all of Sunday working on my last outstanding side project. But first, I was going to get up early and go take some pictures of my GTO with its new license plate adornment.

All was going well on Saturday morning. I picked up the GTO and drove over to the county’s new waterpark and sports complex, which is basically a huge plot of land filled with nicely-manicured grass, soccer fields, baseball diamonds and what-have-you. Unfortunately the most scenic parts of the park were still roped off (it’s still under construction), so I had to settle for one of the less-populated parking areas to take my new photoset. I’ve uploaded all of the new pics to the Photo Gallery if you’d like to see them.

I got home, planning to watch one of the newly-remastered Star Trek: TOS episodes before I got started on putting that marketing document to rest. (Sulu: “It’s naked time, Captain.”) When I got there, though, I found a message on the answering machine. It was from our real estate broker, who mentioned that she had another agent wanting to show our home to a buyer on Sunday at noon. Whoa, okay. I called her back to get the details.

Stress Factor Nine

I’m not sure why, but for some reason, I immediately begin stressing out whenever I talk to our real estate agent, even over the most mundane shit. It wasn’t until today that I figured out why. It’s because every conversation reminds me of talking to one of my high school teachers. You’re just hanging there, waiting for the moment when it’s going to let slip that you forgot something supposedly majorly important, something which was not even in the same galaxy as the rest of your problems. At which time you have two choices: Either bullshit your way out of the situation by pretending that you didn’t really forget it, or admit it and get an earful about how you’re not stepping up and doing the job.

She started off by breaking the news to me that one of the forty other Capris here in the community just dropped its price to below the price we’re asking (besting us by about $4,000). A week ago, we were the lowest-priced Capri on the property. Now there’s one or two others that are listed a couple thousand below us. I’m not going to spaz, because those other homes have been listed for months — and this is just another in a long line of price drops that they’ve desperately undergone to try and stir up sales. Because we entered the market already at that price point, it shows that we know we’re already priced correctly, and buyers will hopefully take that into account. At least, that’s the strategy we’re operating under — a strategy cooked up by our real estate agent herself.

Anyway, she makes a big deal out of this new, cheaper home as if I’m supposed to really feel the pressure. I don’t know exactly why she thinks this is a sales tactic. If anybody needs to feel pressure right now, it’s her. She also makes a point out of telling me how much more beautifully furnished this other home is than ours, like I should be ashamed or something. Do I care? I’m not selling furniture, I’m selling a house. I’m also not a rich, retired snob who has assbags of money to spend on things like ornate oak statues of Ronald Reagan or 24-caret gold spitoons. I remark to the agent that I’m not going to cut my price and get into a perceived “fire sale war” with these other turkeys, and she’s all like, “I’m not suggesting that you do!” Okay, then why don’t you turn off the red alert siren that I hear blasting out of your end of the phone?

She also asks what I use to vacuum my carpet. Since she used to own the same type of home as us, she says that the central vacuum system didn’t come with a “carpet beater” attachment and asks if we bought one, or if we use a separate vacuum instead. Um…I like pizza? Seriously, I don’t think I’d ever heard the words “carpet beater” until that moment. If you’d asked me, I probably would have guessed that it was a slang term for lesbians. (Seinfeld: “Not that there’s anything wrong with that!”) I told her we use a separate vacuum, because it’s the truth. She then says, “Oh, I wasn’t going to spend that extra money on a separate vacuum, so I got a carpet beater attachment.” Thanks for telling me that — is that my cue to feel dumb again now? Nevermind that our separate vacuum was a free gift from my parents; it’s an old one that they were getting rid of.

Out of curiosity, I ask the woman what a “carpet beater” attachment looks like, but she’s too busy enjoying the sound of her own voice to even acknowledge that I just said something. At which point I realize that the conversation was completely devoid of purpose before the first word was uttered, so I let it drop.

Turning to the question of whether we were ready for a showing the next day, she asked me about a variety of recommendations she’d made to help us spruce up the property. Wanted to know if I’d done them. Yes, I said, we did them all, and the place looks great. Apple and I spent some time during the week cleaning, boxing, rearranging and packing stuff throughout the house, and we really were quite proud of what we got done. I’m thinking I just aced the exam, until the agent asks me what I did about the spare bedroom closet. That’s the closet in my office room. A rather full closet, at that. “Uh…it’s kind of a disaster area right now?” I reply sheepishly, realizing that I just missed the essay question on the back of the test and have automatically flunked.

The agent asks if I can get all of that stuff out of the closet and move it up to my parents’ house. I make some sort of comment about “really needing” to work all weekend long, but that I’d do it. Of course that was her opportunity to spend a minute reminding me how she’s only making these suggestions for our own good and to help us sell the place ASAP and yada yada. Seriously, I need Fred and Shaggy to pay a visit to her house and pull the mask off her head; chances are it’ll be Sister Elena in there.

The Closet Clean-Out Commenceth

I hang up the phone and look at the clock. It’s two in the afternoon. All right, I think to myself. I’ll get this closet cleaned out, box up my junk and store it in the garage with the rest of our things that we’ve already packed. We’re using our garage as a staging area, so I figure that’s a good enough place to put the stuff. Most of the packing, boxing, trashing, moving and other physical labor was mostly pretty boring, so I’ll just sum up by saying I was busy with that stuff from 2:00 until 10:00 that night.

At least that fucking closet looked amazing afterwards.

During the clean-out, I ran across all kinds of old stuff I’d completely forgotten about. For example, the letter I wrote to myself during my last year of middle school, and which the school then mailed to me when I graduated from high school four years later. This was a project they made all the 8th graders do, so I wasn’t just one of those special weird kids. The letter was filled with anachronisms, like “What the latest DOS version now? 8.3?” (hah…DOS! What a hoser) as well as some rather funny stuff that seemed to be of great importance to me in 1993, but now (or even in 1998, for that matter) seemed a lot less noteworthy. When I got the letter in the spring of ‘98, I remember thinking it was rather unremarkable. I’d wager I found it a lot more fascinating on Saturday evening than I did then.

I also ran across some other miscellaneous junk that was like a time capsule from my high school days. It seemed I’d thrown a bunch of stuff into a box during the nineties and was only just now opening it again. There were Kimagure Orange Road and Maison Ikkoku idol cards (still with the Doug’s Dugout price stickers on them); a Mobil “Go” card with the brand new C5 Corvette on it; a dScene press pass; several boxes of .17 and .22 caliber lead pellets for my air rifles, a Polaroid of the odometer in Reaper’s ‘84 Honda Civic DX; and lots of email printouts.

God only knows why I printed out emails. They were all from my “cyber sisters” at Mer’s chat room. Yes, we teens in all of our angst had geeky cyber families online back then. Don’t have any illusions, newbies, that it’s any different than your MySpace crap. You just call it “getting an add” and we called it “adding to our c-family.” There were c-weddings, c-divorces and c-suicides, too. To channel Dave Barry, I swear I am not making this up.

There were also albums upon albums of 35mm photo prints from way back in the day, which collectively served as sort of a visual history of my love for Pontiac Motor Division. There were entire photo sets of all of my previous cars — including my ‘93 Grand Prix B4U, and some weathered old shots of me posing next to my brand new black Trans Am WS6 (complete with window sticker) at Red Holman Pontiac. I looked through all of the latter shots, but there weren’t any frames that captured the dude in the monster costume who was across the street, yelling through a bullhorn that I was a poseur trying to make my friends think I’d just bought a Trans Am. It’s sorta interesting, that, because sometimes I feel like my entire life I’ve been followed around by fudgepackers in monster costumes, yelling to the whole world that I’m a big-headed poseur idiot when I’d like nothing more than to just breathe oxygen without being noticed. Tastier irony has not yet been invented.

Anyway, getting off that tangent there, at 10:00 I took a bit of a respite and then decided that I was going to stay up until I finished that marketing document, because otherwise I was not going to sleep properly with the weight of that crushing assignment on my brain. I proceeded to work on the marketing document and finally wrapped it up around 3:30 in the morning. I was quite pleased with it, actually, so at least all the time spent was worth it. To me, at least. I haven’t heard any feedback from da boss about it yet. I suppose it may yet be all for naught, but I have hope.

Another New Day

Sunday morning (that’s today, BTW) Apple and I got up and spent about an hour doing some last minute cleaning, arranging, and preparing of the house for the viewing at noon. The realtor who was coming with the buyer had specifically requested that we not be there, so we had to book it. Apple had to go to work at noon anyway, so I let her drop me off at my parents’ place with my laptop and my GTO keys. I jumped in the goat and went right over to the office supply store to buy some packaging mailing packaging tape (don’t ask, just don’t) since we had run completely out during my “clean the closet!” frenzy the day before.

I enjoyed driving the goat, but make no mistake — I was not in the mood for playing second fiddle to any fogey driver’s lead. On my way to the office store, I encountered a classic Florida fogey trying to make a left turn across the road onto my side. He had all the qualifications — the gigantic Mercury Marquis; an appropriately boring neutral color; an inexplicable three people in the front seat; and literally the entire front half of his car sticking out of the roundabout and into the fast lane. I saw him with plenty of time and checked to ensure that the lane next to me was clear so that I could avoid destroying both our vehicles. I then gave him a friendly, ten second solid horn blast that dopplered past his obnoxious bulk as I dodged around him. And you don’t even want to know about the rev I threw him later. Yes, I know I’m going to hell — save your breath.

Office Store Follies

Things start looking up as I find my favorite parking space awaiting me at the office supply store. For some reason, out in the back of the lot there’s a single space tucked in underneath some trees, peninsulaed by a C-shaped, landscaped median. You read that right — a single spot with no way for anyone to park next to you on any side. So I back the goat in there and head into the store. I spend a few minutes hemming and hawing over the eight million varieties of packaging tape, almost all of which are overpriced, before selecting a couple of rolls and going up to the registers.

I was blissfully unaware of the situation, ripped straight from the headlines of today’s local paper, that I was about to encounter. As with any such store, there are four cash registers, no more than 50% of which are manned at any given time. At Register One, there’s a very Jimmy Buffett looking guy with his wife, who, I kid you not, is buying somewhere on the order of TWENTY cordless phones, ALL of them different. I guess he just got his pension check from Haliburton and wanted to buy one of every phone in the store to see which one has the nicest sounding ring. It was obvious that he was going to keep the clerk at Register One occupied for the entire next lunar cycle, so I chose Register Four instead.

Of course, everyone else in the store has already come to the same conclusion about Register One, and thus is lined up at Register Four. This is somewhere around ten people, myself included, as I roll up on the line. I recognize the girl working at Register Four, too. She’s largely monotonous, gives no indication that she’s capable of human emotion whatsoever, and beyond the “scan items, take payment, make change” procedure is completely incapable of unscripted activity in the course of her duties. Translated into English, the line at Register Four is taking forever to move, too.

Through all of it, I’m chillin’, because the shit I’ve already been through this week makes standing in a long line look like something you do for fun on a beach somewhere in Hawai’i. After a few minutes, the guy standing in the line in front of me apparently decides he can’t take it anymore. He drops his items on the floor right where he’s standing and storms out of the store. Ohhhhh-kay. More room for me, then. I move up to take his place.

More people arrive behind me, so now we’ve got close to a dozen people. Slowly, things are moving. The woman in front of me turns around and starts complaining to me about how awful and slow the service is everywhere she goes. I don’t know about “everywhere,” but I don’t get out much, so I respond that I’ve had a lot of similar experiences at this very store — in fact it seems to get worse every time I go there. The woman then makes an example out of Home Depot and how it’s impossible to get anybody to help you find something in that place, which I also agree with.

Then, though, she feels it’s necessary to explain that Home Depot’s problem is that they’ve hired “all those Haitians,” and how none of them have any idea what building a home is all about, nor do they have any business working at Home Depot. “I mean, they don’t even have homes in Haiti,” the woman bitches, “so why are they letting these people work at Home Depot?” I pretty much just looked at her. She seemed a bit unsettled by the fact that I was no longer jovially laughing it up and agreeing with her, so she followed up with, “I mean, it’s prejudiced, but it’s a fact!” Funny, aren’t those two different things entirely? I continue to basically just look at her wearily, so she stops talking to me.

Finally I get out of there with my tape and go pick up my lunch. Later, after finally arriving home, I would check out the local newspaper’s website and find an article describing the very situation I just went through at the office store. It seems our lack of affordable housing is seriously affecting the myriad of service-related jobs here in town. Your average cashier, waitperson, clerk, etc. can’t afford to live here, so they don’t come here to work. The addition of several new mega-malls and such have put a sudden pinch on our already small pool of service workers, such that the paper basically just comes out and says, “If you thought traffic was bad during last year’s tourist season, wait until you see the retail crisis this season.”

Never, and I say never, has ordering stuff online and staying shut up in your house looked so appealing. Just more reason to feel like that huge home we’re building is worth every penny, for all the hours it appears I’m going to be spending in it just to keep from going out of my ever-loving mind.

A Hot Cup of Work

I must admit, enjoyed my lunch today immensely. Finding small pleasures in life at a time like this is essential, in case you hadn’t guessed. Around 2:15 I packed up my stuff and went home, figuring that the showing was probably concluded by then. Sure enough, I found a realtor’s business card on the kitchen counter, and everything else was still as I’d left it. I put my stuff away and settled into work on my side project, the one for the local programmer whose wife is a doctor.

I’ve been building a website for the practice management software the guy wrote. It’s been slow going, mostly because both he and I keep getting bogged down with other stuff in our lives, usually work. I’ve got to get the site wrapped up by mid-November, and currently have a plan to do just that over the next three weekends, working a full day each Sunday (as I’ve done for the last two weeks). I’m saving Saturday as my “sanity replenishment day,” although chances are I’ll find myself doing some work thing or another that I didn’t intend to, as I also have done for the last two weeks.

Hopping from project to project, task to task like this reminds me of an excerpt from a rambling entry I posted in my Personal Oddball journal earlier this week:

Anyway, here’s what happened today. I worked. Then I worked some more, and after that I worked some more until it was time to, again, work a little bit more. Finally, after working, I can cool off and relax with some work and then have a hot cup of work before I go to bed and work. Uh, I mean sleep.

Finally, around 10:00 or so this evening, I reached my milestone on that side project and packed it up for the night. I then came here to start writing this post for you all, and I haven’t done anything else since — this has been probably the longest entry I’ve ever written on here. I guess that’s a productive use of my time; I dunno. At least writing all this stuff down is somewhat of a relief.

Next Week, The Fun Really Begins

I try not to think about Monday until it’s actually here, because knowing I’m on the cusp of starting this all over again for another week is almost more than I can bear.

First of all, our real estate agent said she would give me a call once she had a chance to talk to the other realtor, the one who conducted the showing today. She wants to get some feedback from this person to see how our house stacked up, so to speak. Anything more than that I dare not hope for; in fact I’d say that’s already hoping enough. I’ll probably shoot into the stress stratosphere again the next time I talk to her as usual, but if there’s some hint of good news in there I suppose it’ll be worth it. I just wonder what she’s going to spring on me next. Carpet beaters, Jesus H. Christ.

I’m meeting with our mortgage broker on Tuesday morning to go over some more questions and options we might have. One specific area I’ll need to broach is what final preparations we need to make sure we can afford to close on the new house in the event we can’t get this place sold in time. He’s already told us we can easily get approved for the full 90% of the purchase price (we’ve already put 10% down), but I will probably want to extend my home equity line of credit another $30,000 or so to make sure we can cover the closing costs in the interim.

At work (my day job, that is) this week I also start my redesign of one of our main software products, a product I designed originally in 2005 when my colleagues were still working for nothing out of some guy’s house during the midnight hours to get it built. This is going to be a huge step forward for us, and I’ve got to bring a next-generation “Web 2.0″ GUI to the table that not only looks snazzy, it also has to be totally customizable for co-branding purposes, and be flexible enough in its presentation to allow every piece of written text on the screen to be translated into any language on Earth. I’ve got roughly two weeks to get the screens prototyped, as development has to begin shortly after November 5th when our lead engineer gets back from China. Did I mention that I still have other recurring tasks to do while this is going on?

Anyway, that’s all starting tomorrow morning, but not before we have the Monday morning “operations meeting” where we get every employee in the company on the phone and listen to them prattle on about what they did last week, what they’re doing this week and what the price of tea is in China (with some of our developers actually in China this month, this could mean literally). The best part about the meetings are the company updates, when we hear from the boss about what’s going on with the company, not just with its people.

Usually the meeting is about 30-40 minutes long if everyone is on-point, but there a couple people who are known to ramble torturously on and on about things which can make it drag out as long as 60-90 minutes. Last week was a 40-minute week, so I’m hoping for a repeat performance. At least we only have these things once a week — there are a great many corporations in America that, I’m convinced, spend their entire operating hours in the equivalent of one big, long, boring, pointless meeting.

Anyway, with that, I’m out. I hope you haven’t fallen asleep reading this. And if you have, well…sweet dreams.

Categorized as Cars, Cars/GTO, Life, Rants