I Could Bring My Little Ghetto Blaster...

Come on, girl,
Let's sneak out of this party.
It's getting boring,
there's more to life than this!
-Björk Guðmundsdóttir

"Brutal Heat Crushes Midwest" is not a headline you ever want to read when you're checking weather.com from Saint Louis. Even on a relatively cool day in July, the humidity here often reaches a level where sweat simply never evaporates, and the heat index Saturday was a ridiculous 121°F. A fine day to spend indoors with the AC cranked, preferably with a large frozen margarita. Not so great if you're planning on spending the day moving furniture into a building whose designers did not have the decades of foresight necessary to install central air ductwork.

Fortunately for me, I had a chunk of cartilidge removed from my spine about four years ago. Mostly this has been a real pain in the assback for me, but today was one of those rare moments where misfortune transforms to fortune. I stayed indoors (and most importantly, avoided all contact with stairs) for the entire day, packing this, disassembling that, and moving the other to a staging area where one of a half-dozen or so of my closest friends would take over. Thank god I still know people too broke to buy their own beer.

Anyway, by Saturday at 8pm we were finally ready for pizza and AC. Everything that needed to go in the U-Haul was done, and we were probably 85-90% finished with the entire moving process. It is somewhat unfortunate that this is the same percentage of the necessary repairs that our the landlord has completed, but we'll make do. At least he didn't forget to have the gas service switched on, leaving us without hot water. The blame for that one goes to A, who remembered that she'd been assigned this minor task after waiting minutes for the shower to warm up.

Even worse than the lack of kitchen and hot water, however, is SWBT's complete failure to connect our phone and (most importantly) DSL last week as they had scheduled. No word yet on why we haven't been hooked up or when we might expect to be, which means days (perhaps longer) with no poker to speak of. I'm not sure how I'm going to make it without a few hours of clicking and folding each day. The Video Poker Trainer I downloaded recently will help, but there's only so long that will hold my attention without real cash riding on the line.

In addition to all this, or perhaps because of it, my focus at work is absolutely shot. My motivation for work has already been at an all-time low due to the stated intention of management to fire me at their first opportunity, and it doesn't help that no one has a clue what I'm supposed to be doing. So far, everyone with any authority has used me as a catch-all for projects will ill-defined goals and tasks that no one still employed here has any working knowledge of. As far as I'm concerned, even if I don't show up two minutes late two days in a row somewhere down the line and get fired, I've been set up for a major failure the moment any system I'm responsible for has a problem. No one here knows how to fix them (or in most cases, what they're supposed to be accomplishing in the first place), and I've been told not to waste my time on research until something actually crashes.

They're going to be surprised when I give two weeks notice the first time I get an after-hours support call. It should be a laugh-riot.

There's gotta be more to life that this.

posted by Captain Freeman @ 5:20 PM