Mean

She put his dog to sleep.

Mark's wife put his dog to sleep.

Without telling him.

Who the hell could do something like that?

I called Mark last night after I got done changing over the system at work to the new software I've been writing for a couple of months. I figured I'd share some amusing news about which marginally-competent people at work got promoted into what over-their-head job. But the conversation pretty quickly turned to his self-destructing marriage and his worries about impending layoffs at his state job.

And then he told me that Cindy put his dog to sleep. Apparently the dog had been losing his sight, and that made him nervous, so he'd been barking a lot, particularly at their twin daughters, who are three or four years old. Superficially, Cindy said that she was "worried about the girls," but jeez, why did she have to have him put to death for her own baseless insecurities? Wolfie never hurt anybody.

You can't tell your friends "I told you so." But all of us knew years ago that there was just something very wrong about this particular pairing. Cindy has a pretty undeveloped sense of anyone but herself, and she has spent the last six or seven years making Mark's life a lot more difficult than it was before, not easier. She has made no bones about intending to take him for everything, including the kids, if the marriage ends, and he has stayed and put up with her impossible demands and moods for the sake of his daughters.

But I think this last stunt is just too much. He sounded terrible. He sounded like... ME. Last fall before I finally started the antidepressants and got out of depression for the first time in years.

I feel like I should do something, but I don't know what.

I may see Debra tomorrow night. I don't know. She may actually come up here (well, not here, but Baltimore) rather than me driving to Reston, which I've always done. I think she'd like the place I hang out these days. I did go back to my old hangout Saturday night for a quick cosmo and some handshakes and "where've you beens?" But I just don't have the taste for that place any more. Things coming apart between me and Heather sort of sullied the waters.

The launch of the new system at work was anticlimactic. The real news was that there wasn't much news. It pretty much worked. People seemed to like it, except, of course, some self-important whiners who were amazed that we didn't seek them out personally to consult them before making changes. It's not like they came of out the womb knowing the 1.0 or 2.0 versions of the software -- all of which I wrote, too! -- so I really could not care less about their prattling. The new stuff is better, in almost every way, than the old.

Your tax dollars at work, folks. I really do work once in a while.