Week 3

I spent Friday morning meeting with a project team in Tukwila that is in big trouble. They are way behind schedule, way over budget, and have not communicated any of this to the business or senior management. There were tears, there was yelling. Whatever. Been through this before, so many times. I’ll get it cleaned up.

Then I had to drive to Bellevue to drop off someone’s business cards. I was in Renton on Wednesday and got asked to bring them to this other manager in Bellevue. I didn’t know there was any urgency until the woman called me Thursday night freaking out that she needed them for a business trip. There were tears, there was yelling. Thus the unneeded trip across the lake. 

Then I had to drive to Everett to meet a new hire on his first day of work. Fresh out of college. Of course the manger who hired him did not order computer equipment so I wandered the building scrounging up a docking station, monitor, keyboard, mouse, mouse pad (a Seattle Sidewalk mouse pad no less. Hey Mark!) Here I am, the new manager, on his hands and knees plugging in cables. As I am doing this one of my people tells me his wife wanted him to ask more detailed questions about how many kids I have and where we go to church. 

I slam my head into the bottom of the desk. 

Really? I am going to get asked this again? Really?

I wonder if there should be tears and yelling. But no. I smile and repeat my standard line that I have cats and that I don’t even like buying kitty litter so there is no way in hell that I am going to put some through collage. Then I volunteer that I have 14 cats. I want to see the reaction. There are wide eyes and looks of horror and the sound of crickets. 

I type in something in Facebook to vent. Michelle is in Ireland and comments that I should just tell everyone that my children died in a church fire.

At 3:00 I head home. I have been working since 6am and I am tired. Oh the joys of driving through suburbia. It takes 30 minutes to get from the largest building in the world to I-5 proper. Then another 90 minutes to get to downtown Seattle. I am not used to this. This is total insanity. Normal, real cities do not have this much sprawl. There is just no excuse for this total lack of urban planning. I think all these white people should be rounded up and placed in tallish apartment blocks near train stations. 

As I crawl south as 3 miles per hour I see just appallingly bad driving. People are awful and stupid. I hate them. I am getting stressed. In a desperate attempt to maintain sanity I put on The Carpenters Gold album. The minute Superstar starts I feel better already. This sense of peace on calmness comes over me. 

As the music plays we learn that Karen is a 6000 year old vampire. It chronicles how she fell in love with the male vampire. He was a guitar player from Mesopotamia. As the chorus comes up we learn that he bailed on her after giving her the dark gift. She’s been kind of pissed for thousands of years now and she is taking it out on bad drivers. If you really just embrace the music and go with it you will clearly visualize an angry and quite pale Karen Carpenter in Egyptian clothing walking down the middle of the freeway, tearing cars open, grabbing people talking in their cell phones, ripping their heads off then sucking the marrow from their neck bones. God I love this song! So cathartic. You go girl! Rip his lungs out! Eat that stupid dog hanging out the window too!

Oh golly, look, I am home now.Time for martinis. 




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