Loop bank job :::::

I was working as a teller and I was having a hard time trying to get used to being there and at my window at 7am. There was a woman named Wanda who had trained me and caught me nodding off a few times so I brought up the tough time I was having trying to get used to a new schedule. She asked if I went out last night and I said I had dinner with friends and the one beer that I had combined with how tired I was knocked me out. Seemingly harmless chitchat it seemed but I had made a horrible mistake. You see, Wanda was an Christian with a capital C and she went to a Baptist church in Evanston. The kind of church that had a pastor preaching fire and brimstone sermons and had random people dancing in the aisles when the holy spirit overtook them.

To Wanda my beer or two that went to my head was proof that I was a drunk and an alcoholic. She then started leaving brochures for the Employee Assistance Program (you could get professional help and therapy paid for by the company) about alcoholism. She would have conversations near me but not involving me about Jesus saving me and she would recite scripture near me so that I could hear.
I asked her, as politely as I could, to please stop and that offended her and only managed to strengthen her resolve. Now I really needed saving. She started setting up at teller windows next to me and talking directly to me asking about where I grew up and my background. Being in banking there is a lot of downtime so I was bored and I answered. I told her that the house I grew up in was in Skokie across the street from Evanston and that I went to Evanston Public Schools and I told her the junior high that I went to and she said,”No.”. She claimed that I was supposed to go to Nichols and not Chute Middle School and no amount of my protests would convince her otherwise. This is where I realized what her deal was…she was all about the aggressive ignorance.

She was right. There was no doubt that I was wrong even though I knew where I went to school but she was having none of that, she was adamant that I went to Nichols because my house was closer to that school. The district is a little screwy in that area I said and that is why I went to Chute. She then wondered why I would lie about that. There was no possible way that she could be wrong so I must have been lying. I talked to my supervisor and she just told me to avoid her which is what I did until one day we were forced to do some back room work together and told me about an annual picnic at her church where everyone brought some food for a potluck dinner. I said that sounds nice. She asked me if I had ever been to the picnic and told me where they held it and I said no…I had not been. She was stunned. How could I have not ever gone to the picnic? EVERYONE goes to the picnic. Well, I said, I am not a member of your church so why would I go plus it seems like a private thing. She went on a rant about me lying about living in Evanston because I went to the wrong school, I didn’t know where her church was and I didn’t know about her church’s annual picnic. Another talk with the supervisor managed to get me the same answer, avoid her.

About a week later I walked out on that job after I got into an argument with some twitchy, sweating, likely coked up CBOT trader about him grabbing the money as I was counting out the proceeds from a check he was trying to cash and then refusing to fill out the over $10K transaction form. The supervisor came by to see what was going on and I got yelled at for arguing with such a valued customer. I left my name tag and walked out.

My cubicle walls...

The cubicle walls were low at that job. Low enough that people passing by can see your head, your face. There was an HR person named Z. One time she called a meeting about open enrollment and we heard about her waking up and a pair of boys shoes were still at the door...and she has three girls. Another time she sat cross-legged in the center of the table in the conference room (this was not a petite woman) and she wanted to “rap” with us about what we do on a daily basis. We started telling her what we do on a regular basis and she said,” you know I have been at this company for almost three years and this is the first time that I know what is going on upstairs!!”. This was said in a happy tone, an “isn't this amazing?” tone. I did not have the same reaction. I was stunned. The HR person does not know what we do?
One day she was walking along while I was concentrating on my work on the screen in front of me and she made this huge deal about how I have to smile more. Loud. The whole floor heard it so I said something about if I was smiling like an idiot while editing tax law you would probably think I was crazy. She claimed that she would think I was happy.
The next incident I had with her was in the cafeteria. I wanted my coffee and she was standing in front of the coffee stand. I said excuse me and I was ignored, she didn't even look at me, so I thought she did not hear me and I said it again and I got a glare and she mumbled something about me lurking. My thought was wow still a weirdo and left it at that. Shortly after that the layoff rumors started and once the layoffs happened I was one of the first to go.

Retrograde

Retrograde...retrograde ::: the idea that some star in the sky can affect my life is just crap isn't it. I can't believe that and yet I read my horoscope. I don't live by it. I kind of just read it and move on. I do not refer to it during the day so....why do I read it at all? +++++
This goes back to the retrograde. In terms of horoscopes a retrograde means that little things might go wrong for whatever period of time it is, a week, a month, whatever. Things go wrong in a normal life so this retrograde proves itself to the believers each and every time. If you get a flat tire it isn't because you hit a pothole or ran over a nail it is because Mercury is in retrograde. It gives the believer something to place the blame on because dealing with the fact that it is all just random. Shit just happens and there is no reason for it or balance to it...just random fucking crap that just happens.

The overwrought.

It was an overwrought story, a bit of a stretch. You, as a clerk of the DMV, do not ask all of the questions especially the one about whether or not the applicant uses drugs or alcohol to the point that it impairs your ability to drive. It does not matter that no person ever would admit to drinking and driving and it does not matter that they never train you what to do if someone says “why yes, I do drink and drive! Should I not do that?”. But our trainer told us that if maybe we didn't ask the question or we were otherwise lacking in our duties and someone was issued a license and one day in the future we get a call that a family member was involved in a fatal accident and the person that you issued a license to was the driver that killed your family member and then the whole case gets thrown out of court because you were the one that didn't do the eye test correctly or did not ask the ten questions. ::::: does that work for anyone? On any level? It sounds like a story your parents would tell you...a boy didn't wash his hands and he touched his eye and his eyes fell right out of his head because of germs. ::::: Can the case really be thrown out of court because of a bad eye test? There is a dead person but oh well...the DMV clerk forgot to ask if he drinks and drives...case closed!

Dream

I went to Apartment 1603 that I assume is a 1BR 1Bath like mine but as soon as I opened the door I saw staircases and gardens going up to, seemingly, no where (like an M.C. Escher painting) and I see some other people (men) with their shirts off wandering around. Suddenly, my shirt was off and I kept wandering around until some guy with a Swedish or German name looked at me and pointed in a specific direction and I woke up.

Memorable

LH was the one that managed to sabotage me at that job or she was one of them. KD did it too with the “everything is a fucking tragedy” talk, everything is impossible. They jumped on those random things that I wrote like lionesses on the hunt. They were unedited, raw and never made it to broadcast but that did not matter. They recited them in front of me and then looked at me to see if I noticed. I worked from home because I had internet access but KD the martyr had to come in so she played up that angle and I looked like I was not dedicated enough. All of this was undermining me so that the first one laid off was the one who looked like he did not care enough. --- At the time, I used to say that I liked living where I am because the lake was across the street :: it was a stock phrase that I came up with to fill in the small talk bank to withdraw as needed. This is the same line that LH used when I ran into her that day on Thorndale. The line was memorable enough to move her to my neighborhood but not enough to keep them from undermining me at that job.

Express Yourself

I was in a cab once coming back from a White Sox game that was in the midst of a rain delay. The rain was torrential and it seemed like it was not going to stop so we left the game when we got in the cab we told the driver where we wanted to go. My brother and I were talking and trying to justify why we left the game and how it was somehow different than the Cubs fans that leave in the seventh inning to go to the bars and this is where the driver said something. He told us that they said that he knows when the rain will end...he knows. I said oh really and brushed it off as just an odd exchange.
+++++ Only later while reading the coverage of the game did I find out that what the cabbie meant was that one of the announcers said that the White Sox groundskeeper has a talent for predicting how long rain delays are and he is quite correct most of the time. +++++ This guy knew something but he did not think that it needed explaining. It was in his brain, in his mind and somehow that was enough to convey the message to us. Did he think that we would know? That we would read his mind? It might be that on the extreme end but I think that the explanation is simpler. It was in his mind so why wouldn't be in ours? +++++ At the DMV this happened way too often. Customers would come up and we would have to ask question after question to get to the heart of what they wanted from us and it still all depended on hitting the right sequence of questions. They would get all the way to camera, the end of the process, before they came to you and said that they didn't want a state ID. They would get annoyed at all of the questions and then make you look like a fool for making a “mistake”. +++++ It is all about being able to express yourself. The ability to communicate. Not many people have that it seems.