His real job, and a recap of last night

It's much cooler here now. The temperature last night dropped nearly 20 degrees, thanks to some pretty violent rainstorms. I waited out the rain talking with a nice young lady from Chicago. She was remarkably easy to talk to, a little hyper but not distractingly so, highly intelligent, and more than cute enough. She also spent her childhood camping in northern Ontario, at the same provincial park we used to go to, before my mother died.

However, as I said, she lives in Chicago.

I suspect this is going to happen to me a lot the rest of my life.

We had a martini, and talked, then wandered around in the rain, and talked, and had dinner (her first-ever crab cake, which she liked very much), and went back to her hotel and talked much more (and kissed a little). But that was all. Sometimes, you have to know when not to get in over your head. There's no assured tomorrow, no assured "next time" in situations like this, and I really, really prefer not to do one-nighters, even if they could be with someone I'd been talking to in email for months. It just doesn't work out well.

It's now late in the afternoon, and I am just about sick as hell of this one guy over the cube from me. Putatively, his job is to handle requests for access to the mainframe. He appears instead to view his job talking on his personal cell phone all day, explaining in pedantic and overdramatic detail to other middle-aged African-American men how the white man (and the African-American women) are the enemy and how to complain about them.

If he says the word "disrespect" one more time, I'm going to go over there, take his phone, and urinate on it.

I want to tell him, "dude, maybe if you got off your ass and actually did your job instead of complaining how you shouldn't be in this job, and you only make $100,000 a year, because all the sistahs and whites and handicapped people get promoted over you, you might actually get promoted!" Not likely, though, because he's pretty much alienated anyone he's worked with, including a remarkable number of said African-American males. We ended up with him in our department because nobody else wanted him. That happens a lot in federal government, but most people it happens to see the writing on the wall and retire out early. Not this guy... he sees as his mission "educating the black man" about how much he's being held down by everybody and everything.

I thought all that "black power" shit disappeared around 1974. Apparently not. It's alive and well, one cube away, and I'm stuck with having to listen to it a minimum of four hours a day.

Your tax dollars at work, folks!

Tomorrow is payday. I made it. The dorks at the First Horizon home equity department apparently still don't know my equity line was paid off with my refinance last week. I told them, "I refinanced, you were notified of the payoff last week, check with your buddies in the mortgage department." Their usual response comes down to something like "it's not our job to check."

Well, eat me, then. Reason #817 why I won't ever be doing business with First Horizon or First Tennessee's home equity lenders, and you shouldn't, either.