Done With Week 1

Week one is done. Everyone knows. Some people are mad, some people are sad, some people are genuinely excited for me, some people are overjoyed that I am leaving. This has been difficult and exhausting. Strangely I cannot sleep so I am up at 6am on a Saturday.  I just donated to KPLU. $1 a day for the rest of my life. Those of you who have complained that I don't give away enough money can suck it. 


After some coffee I decide to take a bath and hopefully fall asleep. I have one of those alarm clocks in my bathroom that lets me play music from my iPhone, so I stream the Diego Garcia album from KCRW ( I also give $1 a day to KCRW so you can suck it again.)  

Oh Diego.  So dreamy.  You don't know who he is because you are not as cool as me, but wow, what great music.  He's like an Argentine Fyfe Dangefield.

Soon I am sitting in the bathtub trying to relax. I have exploded one of those lemongrass bath bombs from Lush. 

Fred comes in and jumps up on the little shelf behind the bathtub. Now he is standing on my head giving my hair a bath. 

I can’t tell if he is trying to be supportive or if he just likes lemongrass. I flick water at him and he goes off to lick it.  It is the lemongrass that he cares about. Soon I am snoring away with Diego serenading me in the background. Then I awake with a start.  Work nightmare.

I don’t know if the next two weeks will be easy now that I have told everyone or if it will be awful. I wish I could say that I am just going to relax and not take anything too seriously. “We are $1 million over budget? Golly, sorry, what are you going to do, fire me?" I am so not wired that way. I can’t seem to turn it off or start to let it go.  I try to fall back asleep but Diego is done.

None of this has started to sink in yet. One of my people….a short, fat, 95 year old Chinese guy from Aberdeen who has these disgusting little plump fingers that I always stare at instead of looking him in the eye….he said to me with genuine excitement, “Wow! Dude! This is a once in a lifetime opportunity! You get to go do good things and get paid for it. Why would you even hesitate? This place sucks. Congratulations!” You don’t normally hear things like that from 95 year old Chinese guys. I am really glad I saved him from getting laid off last year. 

I saw Rasputin for the last time yesterday. He’s off having surgery for the next two weeks. Well, no, he is not actually having surgery for two weeks, but you know what I mean. He spent the hour trying in his own dysfunctional way to explain to me that he is a dick and he knows it and he is working on it and that, perhaps, sometimes, my approach of motivating people by telling them what they do right might, maybe, sometimes work just well as intimidation and temper tantrums. 

Two more weeks. I really just want to be done. Maybe I will just use up those 80 hours of sick time and stay in the bathtub. 

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