Shoes, shoes everywhere
No, I’m not referring to the 150 pairs in my bedroom, but I was on I-395 this morning, and traffic was backed up for miles because there were tons of shoes scattered throughout the three right-hand lanes. Apparently a truck dumped a whole shitload of them in the highway right before I started out. They were kids’ sizes mostly, but if I’d seen a cute pair, there was more than enough bottleneck for me to get out of the car and grab a pair!
Spent the day at a print/design seminar in McLean. I realized what a sore loser I am — there was a drawing for a new Mac G5 (sexy!) and the new Adobe Creative Suite. I lost at both, of course, but I was bitter ’cause a huge newspaper shop got the Mac and my print company got the software and didn’t even know if they should take the Mac or Windows version. Argh! I keep begging my company to, if not buy us new computers, at least upgrade the pieces of shit we currently must suffer with. But of course, I found out that even though I am going to finish my budget year at least five to ten grand below what I budgeted (I made extra cuts and am suffering because of it), I don’t get to keep that money. Not a penny of it. We have to cover other people who don’t know how to stay on (or anywhere near) budget.
In one of my eleven meetings last week, I found out that our slew of furlough days (all of which I worked through, by the way. Unpaid, of course) was proactive, as they bragged. These were scheduled in anticipation of some people (our ridiculous president, for a prime example) blowing their budgets. Gee fuckin’ thanks.
You know what — it’s good I didn’t win the computer. I couldn’t see myself doing anything else with it but taking it home and enjoying it here.
I heard the company wants to finally force one of its more useless employees to leave. This will include an undisclosed amount of money (roughly the equivalent of my salary) as a kind of thanks-for-everything-now-scram bonus. Let’s just say that this is the equivalent of four furlough days. And we wonder why I’m bitter!
Other than that, work has been going really well. Although it kind of sucks when I have great off-site meetings like the one today, because they remind me how bad things really are, and it will take me at least four days to forget what life is like outside the castle. Cinderella will go back to her rags and chimney-cleaning, and the rest of the world has great computers and updated software to make their jobs oh so much easier.
Bah.