You're fired!

25 years ago yesterday, I got fired for the first time!

True, it hasn't happened much in my working life... I think I only got fired one other time. But I remember that one because it seemed pretty stupid. I was coughing my ass off and felt like my diaphragm was going to tear an hour before I was supposed to start a shift working in the cafeteria at the Owen Graduate Center at Michigan State back in November, 1981. It made sense to me that if I was that sick, I shouldn't be handling food, so I called in, and the shift supervisor, this bland, sort of dull-witted upperclassman named Tom, basically said, "well, I guess you shouldn't bother coming in to work any more."

So I didn't. That was my last job ever to involve any kind of food service, and I have to say that I don't miss it. While computing and software have been rather good to me these last 25 years, I do miss being able to eat my mistakes.

I worked in the pizza shop in Owen, and in a graduate dorm loaded with non-Americans, they would come down and order the most weird-ass combinations of pizza toppings. I guess they didn't understand the usual sort of popularity hierarchy of pizza toppings, the old pepperoni/sausage/onions/mushrooms/diced peppers/ham/etc. hit parade. So these Arabs would come down and order a pizza with stewed tomatoes, pineapple, onions, and no cheese, and then... not pick it up.

The crew would then end up eating it.

My tastes broadened under duress.

Anyway, the only other time I got fired was when I was a cashier in the parking garage at the Hotel Syracuse for a while a year or two later, and the manager was incensed that my "car counts" never came out exactly perfect, though my cash drawer was usually a little over, not short (you'd think that'd be a good thing). I learned that my attention to detail seemed to correspond with my perception of the importance (in the global scheme of things) of the work being performed. It came down to, "who gives a fuck?"

Yeah, I know, I'm a grave threat to the American work ethic and all that. Kill me.

The nice side benefit of cashiering at that garage was that a lot of young professional women in downtown Syracuse parked there, and when you're up way high over such women's cars, particularly if they just got in the car and haven't yet adjusted their skirt under their butts, you can get a real eyeful. Ask any truck driver. And skirted suits were shorter back then in the early Eighties. However enjoyable it may have been, that side benefit didn't pay bills, so when I left there it was to do more computer stuff and life has been more lucrative (though less titillating) ever since.

Suzanne and I have been having some rather serious discussions since last weekend. I am in what I call the walking-on-wet-ice phase... I see some things that worry me, but I am not going to make any sudden moves. We can skate over this patch of ice and see what happens, but things are worrisome. She has a bad tendency to put off making decisions, and then when she does make them, she makes what she perceives as the "safe" choice rather than the best choice. She also tends to act on what she thinks other people expect, rather than what she wants to do. It's very off-putting to see, particularly since I usually don't give much of a fuck about what other people expect... even more so when they don't even voice those objections.

And I am not optimistic about meeting her parents this weekend.