All Write, Already!

Ice storm. Jesus suffering fuck, it's an ice storm. The frost giant Ymir himself is pissing all over my car, and the roads. I'm going to be late for my first day of work in 2005. Way to demonstrate commitment and the megacorp spirit.

So I leave a full 45 minutes before I normally would, and -- wonder of wonders -- I actually arrive at work just before my start time. Which annihilates the prep time I'd wanted so that I could figure out what exactly I'm doing today. Which means that I'll be winging it. Christ, do I ever hate to wing it.

The first job of the day is at a farmer's supply warehouse, where halfwits ship sundries to hicks. (Did I mention that I'm a computer technician for one of those big shipping companies that you see in television ads? Think brown.) The other technician who'd laid the groundwork for this job last week had given very simple instructions to the shipping manager on how to get his address list into a format our shipping software would accept. Unfortunately NASCAR Week in Review had Billy Ray Cyrus as a special guest on Sunday night, so Jimmy Joe Bob Cletus Earl had to spend the weekend trying to figure out how to use his goddamned VCR. Eventually he just smashed it with a convenient rock (as he put it, "It's my smashin' rock"), and thus had to tell his drooling coworkers everything that happened on the magic moving picture box.

You may have noticed that nowhere in there did I mention that he did anything with the addresses I needed. You're very astute.

So I think to myself, hey, no problem, it's only a few adresses, right? I mean, how many shitkickers can this place service? Ha, ha! I laugh now in retrospect at my own foolishness. Fifty-three thousand, two hundred, and seventeen, that's how many. I didn't even know that there were that many farmers left in America -- I thought they'd all been replaced by hyper-efficient Japanese farming mecha and illegal Latin American immigrants who work for a shiny penny every day. I mean sure, sometimes the farming mecha get a little out of hand and tentacle-rape the illegals, but to whom are they going to complain?

Anyway, I spend almost six hours scrubbing all these addresses and importing them into our shipping system, when Skeeter Chuck Cooter Gump comes back to the loading dock and tells me that it's their quitting time, and I'll just have to train him and his brother Darryl and his other brother Darryl tomorrow on how to use the Intarweb screen machine.

I leave, frustrated and wishing I had a nice, quiet heroin habit to take some of the edge off, to head for the second customer of the day (whom I've already pushed back to 3:00 PM from our original 11:00 AM meeting time). She's a sweet lady from a worldwide religious charity, but probably not the one you're thinking of. She's the sort of woman who'd bake cookies for a neighbor, or watch your kids if you're running late at work. The one thing she isn't, though, is capable of using a computer. This is the third time I've had to go to her office to show her how to use the software we gave her to review the bill we send her company, and I know I'll be out there at least three more times. When I've finished training her, she thanks me profusely, and I leave, a little uncomfortable with the GIANT FUCKING CROSS in the foyer.

So I get to come home, having accomplished less than half of what I wanted today, and I realize that I forgot to put in my timecard for today. To hell with it. Tomorrow I'm going to pawn the rednecks off on someone else, and just sit at my desk, converting my cubicle Transformer from car to robot and back all day.