Radical Georgia Moderate

i think that you should run for office and quit your job

Turns out it’s a good thing my driver flaked out yesterday, because they gave me a route near my neighborhood again today. Sweet.

Since it’s pushing 10 a.m. and no one has called yet. This is the first day someone hasn’t called since I started working three weeks ago. Possible explanations, listed from most likely to least likely, include:

• Corporate found someone who lives closer to the route I was working to take it over this week, and neglected to reassign me to a new route
• The driver is sick. He was coughing a lot at the end of last week. Work would then be spread around among several of the other drivers close to the area, eliminating the need for me today
• The driver picked up on my thinly-veiled contempt for him and asked for a new lackey
• Someone made the connection between me and my weblog, which could easily happen if Corporate monitors its employee’s surfing habits since web stats tell me at least one reader views this site from UPS computers
• There wasn’t enough work today (pah! The Media tells us this is the busiest shipping day of the year).

Seriously though. How sad would it be if I couldn’t hold down this job? That would put a nice little exclamation point on the year.

UPDATE: What a jackass. He called the wrong person. Just a second ago…

DRIVER: Hey Russell, are you still coming?

ME: Still coming? Nobody ever called me.

DRIVER: I thought I talked to you about an hour ago.

ME: Nope, nobody ever called me.

DRIVER: Well, do you still want to come?

ME: (fighting the obvious temptation to make a dirty joke) No, it’s probably a little late at this point. I can definitely work tomorrow though.

DRIVER: Okay.

Seriously. If I left now, I wouldn’t be out there until 12:30 or 1, which means I’d be working until 9 or 10 at night. No fucking way with this weather being as cold as it is for as little money as they’re offering.

UPDATE 2: Who the hell did he talk to if it wasn’t me? Will some other lackey be forced to stand around in the cold waiting for a driver to show up only to be disappointed when none does?

I must admit the weekend feels a little more glamorous with a numbing, monotonous workweek behind me. If that’s not what’s causing my giddiness, maybe it’s the knowledge that in a few hours I’ll be liquored up with naked women dancing around me. Birthdays rule. Regardless, I didn’t post a rant about my job yesterday because I’ve had somewhat of a change of heart about my driver, and I’m not sure how to react. All the animosity is gone. He still says and does stupid things, but they no longer bother me in the least. I’ve learned to accept that he’s a dolt. So here are some pics from Thursday and Friday, but I don’t plan to make any effort to tie them into a narrative.

Oddly-shaped mirrors fascinate me for no real good reason…

Here’s where Boy Genius got us stuck in a ditch. Luckily, there were big rocks handy to wedge under the wheels so he could drive it out…

I was standing around while he organized packages, and noticed that my shadow was about 20 feet tall…

Exorcising the lactic acid from your muscles will make the packages disappear quickly, according to our hero…

I haven’t done one fucking bit of my Christmas shopping. Damn. It’s probably a good thing Friday’s check hasn’t posted yet, or I’d blow most of it tonight.

Sidetrack: I don’t often recommend greatest hits CDs because I hate the whole concept of greatest hits CD, but I highly recommend The Best of Taj Mahal. It’s a good introduction to his eclectic brand of druggy-jazzy-country-blues-rock. I just thought of that because I was listening to it on the way home from work Friday night. Sucks that I missed him when he was playing Atlanta a few months ago.

Fire extenguisher exploded. Jeebus.

UPDATE: This is today’s object lesson in why you always test changes to code, even if nothing SHOULD go wrong. Crapola. Somehow, the attachment didn’t make it, so the photo is gone forever. I’d describe the cab of the truck as looking like Robert Downey Jr.’s briefcase exploded in it. Ha… Robert Downey Jr… remember Less Than Zero? Art imiates life, eh?

Stupid driver.

Goddamn it.

I can’t quite put my finger on what it is about this guy that stirs up my contempt to the degree he does. Maybe it’s because he didn’t live up to the expectations created by the last driver. Most any driver following up the last guy was bound to be respected only as much as any rebound slut, but… well, let’s start with the cabin of the wretched machine he drives. It’s a cramped and filthy scumhole…

If you couldn’t tell from the first photo, the dashboard is littered with egg shells, a rotten banana peel, a rotten apple core, and a Gatorade bottle that looked like it had been there for weeks. God knows what infections are being incubated in that small space…

Perhaps it’s superficial of me to judge a driver by his truck… even if the truck looks like it was auctioned off by Mayfield Milk decades ago after one too many manufacturer’s recalls, missed oil changes, and shattered clutches… even if its coil springs buckle and sway like a poorly designed suspension bridge on every bump… even if its transmission creaks and pops louder than grandpa’s knees when forced into gear.

It’s true that conversation skills are important when one is assigned to be stowed away in a filthy scumhole with someone for a stretch of time. In all relationships — whether with a co-worker, roommate, friend, or romantic interest — Pulp Fiction taught us the ability to share a comfortable silence with someone is much more important than anything you could possibly have to say. Here’s another exam our school boy failed. Jesus-pill-popping-Christ-on-a-stick, this guy never, never, ever shuts the fuck up.

It’s not just that he yaps. It’s that there’s not a hint of irony, sarcasm, humor, or, really, any sign of emotion or intelligence of any kind in anything he says. That’s not even what bothers me either, though. I’ve had friends like that before, and it becomes endearing after a while. Sort of like the retard who walks around the lunch room picking up pennies people drop on the floor for him.

Maybe it’s the constant uneasy feeling that there’s an awkward conversation lurking just below the surface. Within fifteen minutes of meeting him and starting our route, the subject of the Iraq war came up, and I was put on the spot for my position on it. Some icebreaker, eh? I had heard nothing to give any hint of what his political stances might be, and politics is always dangerous territory for getting-to-know-you chit chat. The way I see it, there are three possible outcomes when starting a political conversation with a total stranger, and only one of them is good:

Good Outcome: The person shares your political beliefs and is interested in comiserating/gloating depending on the outcome of the last election.

Bad Outcome 1: The person does not share your political beliefs and will resent the hell out of you for putting him/her into defense mode about his/her beliefs.

Bad Outcome 2: The person does not have any interest whatsoever in politics, and resents all people who have an interest in politics. Often, this person will resent you more than the person from Bad Outcome 1.

Shit, man, everybody who works outside hates the fuckin’ rain. Try talking about that. .333 might be a good average for a baseball player, but it’s horridly low as conversation starters go.

Before we move past the subject of awkward conversations, here’s another example. At some point we were talking about Asian women versus Brazilian women versus Italian women. God knows how I let that continue past one sentence. Anyway, he felt a need to defend the fact that he’s 45 years old and has never been married, which I didn’t know and hadn’t given a second thought about until that point. Even better, he said he’d been dating a girl for about a year and that “things got real intimate, real early.” Like I didn’t hear him the first time, he repeats, “real intimate.”

My God. I could probably sit here and make fun of him for another 2,000 or 3,000 words, but I’ve got to meet Reggie for beer at 9:15. So… later.

Damn, this is going to suck. But before I shift into overbitch, I will try to give a somewhat objective overview of my predicament. As you may or may not know, I have been working seasonally for UPS as a package lackey/scab. We work basically whenever UPS feels like giving us hours, which could be anywhere from two to ten hours per day. I’ve been averaging about four, but toward the end of last week there seemed to be less to do, so I only worked around two hours both Thursday and Friday. In the process, I picked up a pretty nasty cold at the end of last week which destroyed the opportunity to spend my pitiful earnings on a good weekend with hookers and bl…err, dinner out and a trip to the movies.

Even without illness, it appeared as though my workload would never get heavy enough until the very last week to make this venture at all worthwhile. The driver I WAS paired off with (”was” will come up in just a second) said he would try to get me on with someone else anyway to get me more hours, since he understood a two-hour workday isn’t even worth making an appearance for. The downside to that proposition is it would require me to drive many miles out to some godforsaken area of the state when I didn’t have to drive at all to meet up with that driver.

Where “was” comes in is I apparently have been given no choice in the matter now that I called in sick yesterday. Miss one day with legitimate illness, get reassigned. Some deal. So, in summary… good news: more hours and more money; bad news: long drive to work and no choice in the matter.

More bad news: it’s fucking cold outside! The Weather Channel says it may be 30 degrees outside, but it feels like 20. That’s where the suckitude of this day picks up exponential downhill momentum, rolling at me like a muddy snowball. Oh, I’ll bundle up, alright, but no amount of bundling will keep the cold air out of my lungs. Shit! Piss! Crapola! Fracas! Only nine more days of this horseshit until I’m a regular unemployed bum again. Praise Jeebus. Then I’ll be back to receiving rejection emails and phone calls from the comfort of my own office chair.

I like the photos that go totally wrong sometimes more than the ones that go right…

You might not be able to tell, but this was six inches deep…

Ceilings will be nice at my next job.