When I was younger (how many of my comments begin this way?)(too many) I was hanging out with a girlfriend. We were in Greenwich Village in NYC. We both loved spicy food. We were lucky enough to come across a small shop that sold nothing but various hot pepper concoctions.
They had a table with a bunch of open jars, plastic spoons and tortilla chips.
So while chatting with the owner we sampled several of the sauces and enjoyed them all. With the bravado of a couple of young morons, we asked why there wasn’t anything “really hot” on the table.
She grinned and said that the really hot stuff (I am not joking) was kept behind the counter.
So she brought out a jar of sauce and warned us to only try a very tiny bit. The friend and I laughed. (This probably sounded like the laugh of a pair of drunks stepping out of a low flying plane over an active volcano, wearing blindfolds)
We both took a chip and dipped it into the jar and scarfed them down.
The next half hour or so are a blur. Some of the screaming was probably mine. No doubt the higher pitched ones.
I got some relief by pounding my head against the walls. The girlfriend got some relief by pounding on me.
I do not know the name of the evil that we consumed that day. But this does not matter. The night was supposed to be spent in lascivious revelry.
Instead it was spent fighting each other for access to the bathroom and howling. We loved each other so much.
Breakfast was milk. Ice cream. And yogurt. There was no oral sex for several days.
Don’t ask.
#WritingFromIsolationWard
What the hell is going on here?
Published by NiteMayr on March 14, 2010What else can this guy do?
I make it a point not to whine here on the blog about work; it slips out on the twitter feed here and there; but it’s taking a real heavy load of intestinal fortitude to keep from going all LiveJournal over some static at work.
When I was at my last employer it seemed every day that I was under the gun of probable unemployment; that feeling may have been engendered by my first manager telling his entire team in no uncertain terms that our jobs were about as solid as tech stocks in 2000. This was 1997, we had just fired 23 people from my team (23 of the 25 that where hired along with me oddly enough)
I saw people get dismissed over and over, whole sections of the firm vanishing in the name of keeping the business trim. I suppose at the upper levels; this was the way to do it. After what six major layoffs (rifs) and so on I never shook the “I’m next” feeling. It pervades my work even now.
Why don’t others feel this way? Shouldn’t we feel this way? This, THIS is what I fear, losing the chance to get back in there and doing stuff that I can do. Not unemployment, losing the ability to make it all work. Today I was spending some of my Sunday working out how to deploy Puppet to improve system configuration management; this is after working out some rescue functions, which leads down a rabbit hole that I don’t want to follow…
[Image credit to Jamie Mckelvie, from Phonogram Singles Club]