Working Girl

I was born and raised in New England. In other words, fate dropped me right into the middle of the Protestant Work Ethic (I believe fate, as well as love, is blind and thus did not realise that I was both Catholic and unethical). Even so, I bought the work ethis thing hook, line and sinker.
"Treat every job as if it were the most important job you'll ever have." my father told me. "Work hard and get ahead."
I heeded his advice, more or less. Sometimes, it was hard. At one memorable place of employment, a watch company who shall remain nameless (Timex), my entire job consisted of putting orange stickers on white boxes. It would have been piecework if there had been enough white boxes to go around, but there were not. Grown women would fight to grab boxes. "I can do this," I thought, "there is no shame in honest labor." I lasted 5 weeks.
Towards the end of week 5, I went home for lunch. Now this being the 60's, the days of Peace-Love-Dope, lunch consisted of a sandwich, a cup of Lemon Tie-dye Hippie Yogi tea, and...well, .. let us say I returned to work more than a litle impaired.
I sat on my stool. Actual chairs were thought to breed relaxation and carelessness - wouldn't want to miss the top of that white box. I looked at the rows of women already at work. Their hands flew, their mouths hung open, their eyes....oh God, their eyes, their vacant eyes.... I fled.
But that, I think, was just my worst job. I've had many others in my attempt to find my niche. I was a ski information telephone operator, a cashier, a nurse's aide, a short order cook. I jumped out of cakes (good pay, bad, bad, men). I worked in a laundry putting clothes down a chute. I was a day laborer, a weaver, a waitress, and a nurse. I worked at a machine that put a little long thing into a little round thing, always suspecting that the supervisor had some Freudian problems and just liked to watch. For quite some time, I worked in an LDRP unit at a local hospital.
This was my first experience with real job predjudice - not against women, everyone was female, but against differentness. I noticed right away that all the employees of this department were young, blonde WASPs with a husband, a minivan and 2.2 kids. I tried to fit in. No, I take that back. I've never tried to fit in anywhere. But I did try to demonstrate by my actions that just because someone is different, that doesn't mean they aren't good at their job. I worked my buns off. In the end, I found that my small, dark, mixed-race self overrode my value as an employee. When I graduated from nursing school eigth in my class, they let me go. Although nearly all of the staff nurses tried to intervene on my behalf, the blonde WASP unit supervisor with the husband, minivan, and 2.2 kids was not about to let doing the right thing stand in her way. But that's alright. I learned, along with how to put in a foley catheter, that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
For a while I attended a CETA secretary school. This was a school set up by the government for people who were too dumb or too unmotivated to get through high school. It was a three month program. I finished everything in three weeks, except for typing which requuires a level of manual dexterity that I do not possess. They didn't know what to do with me. At first, I spent class time pecking at my typewriter, bored. Next, I became the designated person to take the students who arrived drunk and walk them around the parking lot until they sobered up. Finally, I taught the math class after the math teacher was laid off. Armed with my new secretarial skills, I left school and immediately got a job as a private duty nurse's aide.
Private duty aide work is not hard. You don't have to do much and you do get to read. However, the job usually involves contact with sick people and small dogs. It did not take me long to decide that I did not want to spend my life with sick people or small dogs. I quit.
"Treat each job as if it were the most important one you'll ever have." How do you do that when you're a waitress in a donut shop? Does doing a good job consist of scrubbing the coffeepots and counters until they shine and keeping the donut case filled? Or does it consist of sucking up to the customers so they'll purchase one more cup of coffee? In due time I discovered that I did not enjoy scrubbing or sucking. I collected my pink slip, which fetchingly matched my uniform, and moved on.
I have been told, "Never work for a boss who is less intelligent than you." Puh-leese. Where do we find such a person, such a gem of authority? We're the ones who have to take those aptitude tests. We're the ones putting pegs into holes and in the time it takes to complete one of those tests, twenty people in America have been promoted past their level of competence.
I work now as a Labor & Delivery nurse. I like this because someone else (the woman in labor) does all the work. Also, they've made me night charge nurse. Yes! I, too, have been promoted past my level of competence. You know, it's not half bad.

My Name is Linda and I'm a Facebook Addict

Forgive my absence, dear readers, but I've been - I'm so ashamed - on Facebook. It started innocently enough. Every now and then, I'd get an invitation to join, which I would respectfully delete. But when I noticed that so many of my co-workers were on it, I thought, "What the hell. What could it hurt?" Like addicts the world over, my co-workers just smiled and encouraged me. Oh if I'd known then what I know now. Email and blogs are mere gateway drugs because Facebook is, for sure, the heroin of cyberspace.
The addiction is immediate. "Hellooo..." said Facebook "and who is this beautiful, scintillating woman who has just logged on? Would you like to send someone a useless gift? Help save the rainforest? Did you know 3 of your friends think you're stupid?"
I didn't log off for hours. Hours! And I might have stayed on longer if the smoke alarm hadn't gone off because I was burning dinner.
I've only gotten worse.I have taken the stupid, pointless quizes, sent and received granny pants, small animals and half-eaten cookies, and found out that my stripper name is Boom Boom Luscious Lips. I have "friended" people I don't like and who don't like me. I've seen photos of people I went to high school with and let me tell you - when you graduated in 1972, that's not neccessarily a good thing!
But the worst ( I have no shame left. I'll tell you every sordid detail), the very worst, is Hatchlings. For those of you who are not Facebook addicts, Hatchlings is an application (they call all these little Facebook games applications, although what one is applying for, I don't know) where one searches various placces on Facebook for virtual eggs which then "hatch" into a variety of virtual creatures which then have to be fed more virtual eggs, thus ensuring that one could conceivably play this game forever. Sure, I could just stop, but if one doesn't feed the hatchlings, Facebook lets you know that your little creatures are virtually unhappy. I was raised Catholic. It doesn't take much to make me feel guilty.
I could expound further on this subject, but I am beginning to feel the first pangs of Facebook withdrawal. So here is my warning - as usual, I'm the dire warning, not the good example - Use Facebook at your own risk because it will suck you right in. And if anyone hears of a local Facebook Anonymous, please let me know. I may need them when I hit bottom.

Unsafe at Any Speed

What vengeful God decided that age and clumsiness must increase in equal proportions? Why is it that when one gets to the age where a fall has a greater chance of doing harm, one also becomes more likely to fall? This is not just my opinion. I have plenty of anecdotal evidence. I have witnessed an aging coworker pour candy into a bowl and completely miss the bowl. Another coworker fell, and I have to say, not gracefully, into a patient's crotch. My husband recently fell down the stairs. My friend Nancy, who is only a few years older than me, fell out of a chair she was sitting in (She says the chair pushed her, but I suspect she's just trying to save face).
This morning, as I was crossing a parking lot that was nearly empty, I tripped over one of those plastic speed bumps. There was an entire parking lot that was practically obstruction-free, but my aging self, like one of those GPS ''s gone awry, found this speed bump to trip over. My already-bad knees are scraped, throbbing, and swollen. My palms are bleeding. And this causes me to think - "How did I get from the lithe, graceful person I was to this unsteady, accident-prone person? I used to be fairly good on the balance beam (people who know me think I am making this up, but I'm not). Now I can't balance on land. And don't even get me started on the stiff joints or the memory lapses.
I submit that this is a basic design flaw. It's all unfair and I think God needs to rethink the way he chose to divvy up the physical agility. And God, if you're listening, I would really appreciate it if you could take care of this before I have to ambulate over any wide open spaces. I'm an accident waiting to happen.

Quote

"They don't know nothing about redemption. They don't know nothing about recovery."
- Against Me

Quote of the week

In debating the merits between dogs and cats, not having to walk a cat when it's twenty below zero deserves consideration.
- D. Larson

Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here

Christmas time is here again, bringing with it the smell of pine and gingerbread, twinkling lights, the rustle of wrapping paper, the beauty of newly-fallen snow and the dreaded visit to the post office. Yes, as everyone who has friends or relatives living out of state knows, the post office is not the place one wants to be during the holiday season. It is also the place one can't avoid if one wants to get those Christmas gifts sent on time.
Well, let's just talk about the words "on time". I suspect that "on time" is an abstract concept to the U.S. Postal Service rather than a reachable reality. I base this on an experience I had with a Christmas package that traveled up and down the east coast several times before arriving at its intended destination of Connecticut. On the last swing of this postal pendulum, it took only three days to get from Virginia (I don't know what it was doing in Virginia) to Connecticut, thus being "on time" if one disregards the fact that it had been mailed five weeks earlier from West Palm Beach, Florida. The post office also disregarded the fact that I had mailed it "priority mail". I have since learned that "priority mail" means the customer pays extra for his package to be one of the first to be used to prop open the mail room door and forgotten about.
But I could take the late deliveries. I could ignore the ubiquitous photos of wanted criminals tacked to the wall. I could, possibly, learn to endure those self -stick stamps that stick to everything else on their way to the envelope. I could get used to the absence of any parking spots within a half mile of the post office. All of these things are minor irritations when compared with the lines. The last three times I've walked into the post office (and I'm not making this up), a postal employee working behind the counter has looked at me and put out his little "closed" sign. The last time, as he put out his rotten little sign, he winked at me and said, "Lunch break!" It was 10:15 in the morning. Visions of giving him something to chew on danced through my head.
However, in all due honesty and fairness, I cannot blame the slowness of the lines on the postal employees alone. No, they have help and lots of it from the postal customers. Every drone, every thoughtless imbecile, every mother with three undisciplined kids, every idiot who can't figure out how to write an address on a box - arrives at the post office ten minutes before I do.
Think I'm being paranoid? During my last ill-fated visit to mail a package, a man stepped up to the counter with about twenty-five letters, purchased stamps for them, and proceeded to hold up the entire line while he affixed each stamp neatly and precisely on an envelope. Meanwhile, the person (and I use this term loosely) who had been waiting on him seized the opportunity for a quick "lunch break". As we waited, a mother gazed into space as her darling son detached the chain link line-divider and proceeded to chain whip the legs of the waiting customers. His cries of delight nearly drowned out the sound of an argument occurring at the only other open station where two customers were debating whether or not it should cost $3.59 to mail a book to Kenosha.
But that wait was a piece of cake compared to the traffic jam I experienced last year when a little old woman tried to mail a package which was held together with what appeared to be toilet paper. The counter person had to rewrap the entire package after explaining, in a loud voice, why the toilet paper tape would not suffice. When her package was finally rewrapped and taped, the little old lady decided she would pay her $33.82 shipping charge with change. Exact change. From the bottom of her purse. Which she could not see. Coin by coin. Her quavering hands kept dropping change. "Don't worry, young man," she smiled, "I have plenty of time."
So you can see why I view with aversion the annual mailing of of my Christmas packages to the members of my family who now live in California. Maybe this year I'll bring along a book to read while I wait. Better yet, it might be a good idea to deliver my gifts in person. After all, it only takes five days to drive to California.

The Call of the Mall

At this time of year, as Christmas lists are written and visions of sugarplums dance in other folk's heads, visions of dragging my husband to the mall dance through mine. I don't think it's accurate to say my husband hates shopping. No, "hate" doesn't convey in strong enough terms, his absolute aversion to, break-out-in-hives-from, loathing of shopping in general and malls in particular.
Furthermore, I think a lot of husbands are like this and it stems from basic gender differences in our attitudes towards shopping and dissimilarities concerning what we feel it's necessary to shop for (Yes, I can hear the politically correct screaming in the backround). Men tend to feel that only big things are worth shopping for. Big, mechanical things. Things like cars, boats and high tech sound systems. A man who blanches at the thought of buying his own socks can easily spend an entire morning at a car dealership just browsing. He even has definite opinions concerning Corinthian leather vs cloth seats. But try to explain the nuances between the peach and melon cashmere sweaters, or even why someone would want to spend that much on something to wear, then he is completely out of his element.
Is this nature or nurture? Well, the studies aren't in yet, but I opt for nature. Yes, I believe that if my husband had been raised in a vacuum and released into the world at age 30, he'd still have an avid dislike of shopping. I believe that male babies, if they could only talk, would say, "No, Mommy, not the mall! I'll drink all my bottle. I'll eat strained peas. I'll go to sleep without fussing. I won't grow up to be a sex offender. Just please don't take me to that mall place!" (Baby girls, on the other hand, would be pulling their booties on.) I believe that cave men - well, you get the picture.
Nonetheless, this Christmas season, again, I will drag my husband to the mall. He'll promise not to have a long face. He'll promise to stifle the melodramatic sighs accompanied by a glance at his watch. He'll promise not to ask, several times, "How long is this going to take?" Within fifteen minutes at the mall, he'll have broken every one of these promises. After half an hour, he'll begin dropping bags and dragging his feet. Forty-five minutes brings on the psychosomatic illnesses.
So why do I bring him with me? Do I enjoy making him suffer? Do I believe this is good for his character? Well, no, but hope springs eternal, and each holiday season, I fantasize that once at the mall, he'll have a revelation; that he'll slap his forehead and say, "What was I thinking all those years? Shopping is fun. Shopping is good. Shopping - where have you been all my life?!"
Logically, I know that this is not likely to happen. Statistically, I know the odds are better that I'll see Jimmy Hoffa buying his own socks than I'll see my husband doing so. But hey - this is Christmas! This is a time of giving, a time of good thoughts and good cheer, a time of gifts and buying sprees, a time of romance (Yes! Romance!) And on that note, I think I will go find my husband and tell him we have a date - for the mall.