Spoiler: Happy ending.
Okay, you know how “The Ex” friended me on facebook, right? Well, of course, I had to write a quick note to her a day or so later saying something to the effect of “everything’s perfect” because, more or less, everthing is. Well, of course, the following Friday, I lost my job.
Now, I didn’t *LOSE* it, lose it. It wasn’t a “JAYBIRD, GET IN HERE! YOU’RE FIRED!” situation as much as a “welp, the contract is winding down, we need you to interview for your same job to see if you’re going to be kept on the new contract, we’re going to be reshuffling, best of luck to everybody”, that sort of thing. As it turns out, they’re keeping a little more than half of us, and I ain’t in the little more than half that they were keeping. There are all kinds of things that are true about the situatioon, like “I knew it was a long, but not indefinite, contract when I signed up five years ago” and “I knew there was a chance of this happening back in whenever” and “what with foreknowledge, frugality, severance, and vacation, this won’t even be a bump in the road until Summertime” and all that stuff… EXCEPT I COULDN’T SAY ANY OF THAT ON FACEBOOK BECAUSE I HAD JUST FRIENDED “THE” EX!!!
So, like, I had the worst day and I didn’t even get the pleasure of complaining about it because I had an illusion to maintain.
So I post my current resume to the various places where one might post a current resume and I post my updated resume to the places where I last posted a resume (and, I do say myself, it’s weird having a real one of those… I mentioned this to a co-worker and he mentioned the day he realized that he no longer felt like he needed to include his time at the bottle toss at Six Flags on his resume was the day he finally felt like a grownup)… and I had an interview by the following Thursday.
Anyway, the day after the interview (Friday), I get called into my boss’s boss’s boss’s boss’s office where he tells me that he wants to keep me on a different contract. One where they need a Jaybird, very badly. Instead of working for this person, I’ll be working for that one. I thank him for the opportunity. WOO HOO!!! I’M NOT FIRED!!!
And I can’t talk about it on Facebook.
Because I have an illusion to maintain.
So I’ve been thinking about that and the situation that got me here and trying to find as close to a good song as I can and all I can come up with is this one:
So… what are you listening to?
Dude. Privacy controls.
Click on that little thing that says “Public” or “Friends” and change it to “Custom”. Go down to the box that says “Hide This From” and put in “The Ex”.
Problem solved.
This was much easier when all I had to worry about was not talking about religion, politics, or philosophy on facebook. Now I can’t talk about religion, politics, philosophy, or bumps in the road.
Which means that the only stuff I can do on facebook is talk about going out for ice cream or post drunkenly.
Dude. Be Creative.
“Got a sideways promotion. Beats retiring, which was the other option!”
I’ll probably pull something like “I start in the new department tomorrow!” when the time comes.
I love stories that turn out well and in this economy I especially like hearing stories where people stay employed.
Congrats.
ME TOO
(thanks)
Last week someone posted some Ryan Adams, which inspired me to put him back in my rotation for the week.
http://youtu.be/A-Zcwdsl9fc
If you want hear the Whiskeytown boot that kicked off (HA!) my most recent round of listening, it’s here:
http://captainsdead.com/whiskeytowns-drinking-games.html
Sound quality is OK (but I love GbV, so my tolerance for lo-fi may be higher than yours); energy levels are off the charts.
Wish I’d been at this one.
The trick, I think, is for you to put the bad news on Facebook and then add an embellishment. Something like,
“My contract ended at work today and isn’t being renewed. That’s probably just as well, since now I can take Springsteen up on his constant harping trying to go on tour with the E Street Band. Man, that guy can whine like nobody’s business!”
On that note, I actually saw The Boss a couple of weeks ago. Many years ago he was my very favorite rock-pop act, but then Born In The USA came out and even though it was a huge hit I though it was a little “meh”, and then he dropped the E Street Band and I didn’t like Tunnel of Love at all. I stopped buying his albums altogether, and his great records became the ones you so overplay for so many years that they eventually fall entirely out of any kind of rotation.
BUT THE CONCERT WAS SOOOO AMAZING!!!!!
So these past two weeks I’ve been going through a kind of Springsteen renaissance. I’ve been listening to a lot of the old stuff, and I’ve been discovering that the newer albums I hadn’t heard are wonderful. I think Land of Hope & Dreams might be my very favorite song in the world at this moment. (Seriously, this morning at the gym when it came up on my playlist I played it over and over, like, 6 or 7 times until it was time to go home.)
And of course, Christmas music.
I look at what I wrote and I find myself aghast that I still have facebook drama.
I’m 40. The drama in my life should consist of my younger friends complaining about their younger friends having drama.
I’ve been a consultant too long to ever worry about a contract ending. Fact is, for all the years I’ve been consulting, I’ve never done the job on the req sheet, not once. It’s always something else. Competence keeps the good guys signing timesheets and bad guys signing unemployment checks.
Oh, yeah. I’m there with you. (To be honest, I was shocked when I found out that I wasn’t kept on… and now I’m hearing about the new and improved team that will be replacing the old team and, to be honest, I’m finding that I should have been shocked had I been asked to stay… without getting too gossipy, it’s the tension between the CM/technical writing team and the installation team and the latter’s assumption that the former is really quite extraneous. If the installation specialists will not listen to someone like me say “dude, CM and proper control of installation instructions is very, very important”, then the specialists will learn that lesson from the Gods of the Copybook Headings.)
One disadvantage of not being pseudonymous is that I’m uncomfortable telling any work-related horror stories less than about a decade old. Even some of those, since I still know most of the participants.
Anyway, let me add my congrats.
I AM pseudononymous, and I’m uncomfortable telling any work related horror stories.
Well, about mine, at any rate.
Consultant horror stories are a dime a dozen…The company that will anesthetize untrusted consultants while transporting them to their job site, is a personal favorite of mine (they use black helicopters).
There are a lot of white hats signing unemployment checks, actually. Some of them among our best friends, and among the people I most admire for their skills, sometimes. It’d be nice to believe that competence will out, but it often doesn’t.
Jaybird and I are incredibly lucky that his local environment keeps recognizing how good he is at what he does. If it had temporarily failed to do so, even for months, I wouldn’t have assumed it was a judgment on his competence. Just a bad roll of the dice.
+1
Also, my congrats as well.
Amazing the things we will go through to maintain illusions.
She’s not even part of my life anymore!
Your mouth (and mind) are saying that, but your actions speak differently.
That’s the most irritating part!
I wonder what would have happened, if you had ignored the fact that The Ex could see what you wanted to write on Facebook?
Friday the X-7th: Dang. Lost my job. (2 likes, 7 comments)
Friday the Xth: Dang. Got a new job. (7 likes, 2 comments)
(And I should say to everybody that I was inspired to post this very post by JHG here. We were writing back and forth on a post for the front page and I was writing apologizing for not even coming close to being able to have even *THOUGHT* about my half of the project and I gave him the story you see above, minus the references to illusions. He wrote back a lovely email and in the middle of the email he said, ahem, “Amazing the things we will go through to maintain illusions.” and I realized that, dude, there’s a post there. So I stole his phrase, worked it into my post, and then I had to pick out a song. So that’s the background to today’s Music post.)
The ingenuities we practice in order to appear admirable to ourselves would suffice to invent the telephone twice over on a rainy summer morning.
— Brendan Gill
I like that quote, Mr. Schilling.
When a person cannot deceive himself the chances are against his being able to deceive other people.
– Mark Twain
It’s strange to be retroactively relieved on behalf of a friend regarding a problem you didn’t know he had until after it was resolved. But there I am, it seems. Congratulations/whew.
And I am listening to obscure Ravi Shankar tunes on Spotify to familiarize myself with him beyond a throw-away joke from an old “Simpsons” episode. For some reason I decided to start with some tunes he did in collaboration with a couple of Japanese artists, which I (along with the Squirrel, wriggling in my lap) am enjoying.
retroactively relieved on behalf of a friend regarding a problem you didn’t know he had until after it was resolved
I went through a period where half my conversations with my mom began with “oh, I forgot to tell you, but before I do, you should know that this problem is totally resolved and nobody got hurt.”
Here’s Ravi Shankar with George Harrison. Nice simple tune, suitable for Young Ones.
He’s Norah Jones’s dad. (This would impress many other men more than it probably does you.)
Is that true???? How is that not better known?
Me nem nesa.
I thought it was well-known. I remember reading it and I am not even too familiar with her.
That most of us goggle more at beautiful woman than Russell does? I didn’t think it was secret.
Congratulations on finding a solution to a problem I didn’t know you had!
I recently listened to Momoe Yamaguchi’s 1977 Cosmos for the first time in a while. It has that wonderful old-timey Japanese melodrama characteristic of enka without that weird vibrato that makes it so unlistenable. The title refers to a type of flower, not outer space. It’s about a girl in the garden with her mother, on her last day at home before her wedding.
I’ve also been listening to Jackson Browne a bit after hearing his cover of “Stay” on the radio. I’d vaguely recalled a phrase from that song a couple weeks earlier, and it had really been bugging me that I couldn’t remember what it was, or even enough of the lyric to look it up. “Running on Empty” is pretty good.