Tomorrow, my life of ease and pleasure must end:a reflection on the mortal coil

Having formed a plan to go to a temporary agency and seek gainful employment tomorrow, I shall take a few moments to wank about the vicissitudes of fate. As some of you may already know, the Editor has been gainfully unemployed for several weeks, and has happily filled said interval with a successful (read: did not end up broke and naked and walking home across the desert hallucinating) trip to Las Vegas, a great deal of drinking, more drinking, some sleep, and several historical novels, not to mention various turns at short-term contract labor to pay the bar tab in the meantime.

Now, I face the fate of all mankind, except those born with a trust fund: I will work for some pittance, in a job which offers no scope for creativity, advancement, or drinking. Well, I suppose I could find one which had at least one of the three. But not all. Wank, wank, wank, I know. That's actually the end of my complaint. In fact, I've become remarkably stir-crazy lately, probably because I haven't not worked for three weeks since 1999. On the whole, I recommend a brief period of unemployment to anyone, especially when you can walk out of your crap job and get the the car to Vegas, while honking the horn and screaming "See ya, suckers!" at the top of your lungs. I was a pussy, though. I didn't yell that until I was out of earshot. The Editor lacks the courage to be properly rude, at times, and in fact still needed to return for a last paycheck. Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all, it seems.

But I suppose this rant will really be about workplaces which promise much and deliver little. One wonders why one would hire an intelligent, experienced person for a management position, dump an enormous project (the procuring, setting up, and running of a new and complicated piece of specialty sofware) on said person, who then worked 70 or 80 hours a week, without having a day off, ever, for two months, and then come around to their desk every ten minutes or so and bitch about their choice of pen. Yes, pen. Apparently, only pencils are appropriate when writing on certain types of lined paper, as the Editor was to learn in detail over the following weeks. Verbally, and in written memos. (Which were not, I might add, written in pencil. Hypocrites.)

Ahem. This, of course, is after the fact, but somehow it still feels good to vent my spleen about it. The point is, I wonder how people can sabotage their own organizations so effectively, without even seeming to notice what they're doing. The lovely Tifanie is now pretty much holding down the fort for me at this pestilential hellhole; I can honestly say that meeting her is the one and only good thing to have come out of this utterly wasteful experience. Anyone who reads this, and knows her, please treat her with kindness and care during the term of her sentence. Her supervisors are both evil, evil bastards, with black souls rotted down to their maggot-ridden cores. A good exorcism would probably help the place no end, or a zombie attack. But I've given up hope of that.

But wish me luck at the temp agency tomorrow. I hope they find me qualified to enter data, or perhaps operate basic telecommunications equipment, such as, y'know, phones. It ought to be fun, actually; since temping doesn't feel like actually having a job, I can pretend to be unemployed a while longer. And temp employers usually don't notice if you're hungover. In fact, they probably wouldn't even notice if I were a zombie, lucky for me . . . I mean . . . heh heh . . . even though I'm NOT. Really.