Maybe this year will be better than the last

Not much sign of that so far, though… Oh, before I get into what a drag today was, let me note that my clix list has been updated, not only with the most recent trades and acquisitions, but also with some notes as to what figs I’m looking for and why. So if anyone out there has any they want to trade, or is just inclined to buy me things for no good reason at all, you can check it out. And if you happen to see any HeroClix at a yard or garage sale, where the people selling them clearly don’t know what the hell they’re dealing with and are getting rid of them at garage or yard sale prices, pick ‘em all up and let me know how much you paid. I just dream about somebody finding a tray or a box of these things somewhere and scarfing up, say, forty of them for a nickel each, or something.

Today has been one of those worthless pointless really blah days where nothing particularly good happened, and there were a few minor irksome incidents, or just niggling disappointments, that have ended up tipping me into a fairly pissy mood. I wouldn’t say I’m depressed, but I am rather down, and fraught with dread at the notion of actually having to go out on the floor and work for Accent in two weeks or so.

Before we get to that, let me mention that according to Dave Fiore, I, along with Kurt Busiek, Mark Waid, and at least one other person whose initials I don’t recognize, am “responsible for the ‘retroactive infantilization’ (re-juvenilization’?) of Silver Age superhero comics”, or some such shit.

As is nearly always true with Dave, I have only the vaguest idea what he’s talking about, and frankly, I’m always amazed he can somehow manage to limp to his keyboard and type coherent sentences with the entire Chrysler Building jammed firmly up his pretentious, smarmy, snarky ass. However, to the extent I can understand what Dave is saying, it appears he is crediting me with… somehow… in some way… altering mass perceptions of what the Silver Age was, at least, to the same extent as Kurt Busiek and Mark Waid have. I would find this flattering, except it seems clear to me (and hopefully to any of you who know who I am in comparison to Mssr.’s Waid and Busiek) that Dave is simply off his meds, since Waid and Busiek are, indeed, rather influential authors in the field of superhero comic books whose perceptions of and writings regarding the Silver Age may well have had some impact on how many people feel about the Silver Age. I, on the other hand, am someone whose audience can almost certainly be numbered in the dozens, and for Dave to credit me with having any influence whatsoever on how anyone at all regards anything strikes me as the ravings of a deranged mind, or just a very very silly one.

Beyond that, I’ll simply say that while I am unclear as to exactly what ‘re-infantalization’ actually means (other than that Dave, like anyone else who would use such an idiotically pretentious non-word to describe anything as cool as Silver Age superhero comics, is a vast and gigantic asshole) I suspect Dave is trying to say that I think superhero comics have an essentially childish sense of wonder and whimsy to them, and that they work best when that essential childlike viewpoint is revered rather than despised. Dave, alas, is one of those tiresome grown ups who feels that if he is going to enjoy something as childish as superhero comics, he has to somehow recast them into more acceptably adult terms. I’ve never had any use for grown ups who feel that ‘childish’ is always an insulting term, and who have to make everything really grim and serious and meaningful before they can admit to enjoying it… they strike me as being pretty much wastes of protoplasm. But, still… it’s nice to have someone think that apparently my viewpoint regarding Silver Age comics is as influential as Kurt Busiek’s and Mark Waid’s.

Or it would be, if Dave weren’t clearly rather dotty.

Back to my mediocre/bad day… well, I’d been expecting a package of clicks from Mike Norton today, and in fact, looking forward to it being here all day long at work, and, well, it’s not here. Hopefully it will arrive tomorrow, but, you know, I expected it today and looked forward to it being here all day and now… bleah.

In addition, a few other people from my blog have indicated in vague ways that various packages from them might be on their way to me at some point that, you know, might have ended up with me getting something today, and I was kind of hoping to win a postal trifecta and have all sorts of cool stuff waiting for me today… but, no… we didn’t even get anything in the mailbox, much less on the front porch where the mail lady leaves packages.

I’m trying not to worry that Paul’s worthless non-friend Chad might have wandered by, seen a box or boxes on the front porch (Paul slept all day today and wasn’t even awake when the mail lady came around, no doubt) and skipped off with them. That’s probably nothing that should trouble me, and most likely I’ll get Mike’s package tomorrow, but right now, well… it’s fretful.

I probably didn’t mention on this blog that last week… well, no, I couldn’t have, since my last entry was Thursday, written right after work… last Thursday night, Paul’s non-friend Chad, whom I’ve mentioned before in a few entries, stopped by, drunk off his ass, and watched about half an hour of a clix game between me and Paul and a few other people, before he finally got up and staggered out again. While he was watching he was hunched over at one end of the table looking on with great apparent interest. During his visit, he told us he’d just been laid off, and asked how the plumbing repairs he’d done for us several months before this had held up… and they’ve held up fine (Chad fixed an annoying leak for us, in exchange for me doing some word processing work for him in the future for a home business he’s never bothered to launch).

Hours after he left, we finished the clix game, other people also departed, and I started to clear the table off. At the end of the table where Chad had been sitting, forgotten by me while we’d been playing, there was a small stack where I’d placed Paul’s bank card, the water bill, and the $60 I’d used Paul’s bank card to take out of the ATM on my way home from work so that Paul could pay the water bill the next day.

There was only one $20 bill there, on top of the water bill, with Paul’s check card still neatly on top of it.

Now, I never assume the worst about anyone, I’m gullible that way. I just figured Paul must have picked up $40 and left $20 on the table for some reason. So I said, “Hey, did you leave this $20 here for some reason?” and Paul said, “What, out of the sixty? No, I haven’t touched that.”

Then, a few seconds later, Paul swore, explosively, “FUCKin Chad.”

I would probably have never gotten around to thinking Chad did it on my own, because as far as I’m concerned, if someone is welcome in my home, I trust them pretty much absolutely, and it would never occur to me to lock up or hide valuables from such a person. However, according to Paul, he’s known Chad had done stuff like this before… just never to Paul… and if Paul had remembered the money was there where Chad was sitting, well, he’d have moved it.

Personally, if I knew I had to hide valuables from someone, I wouldn’t let them in my house. I guess Paul has learned that lesson now, too. But given how strapped we are for cash this month, well, it was an expensive one to learn.

Now, I understand Chad’s point of view. He just got laid off. He was drunk. (Chad’s always drunk when he comes over.) He did some work for us that a plumber would have probably charged us a few hundred bucks for (or that our landlord would have done for free, but been annoyed with us about), in exchange for some hypothetical future work from me that he was never going to actually have me do, most likely. And just a week before that he’d given Paul a couple of items from his constant yard sale for nothing, including a rotisserie grill Paul and I really like and use a lot.

So, seeing $60 sitting there, doubtless he didn’t have much trouble rationalizing ‘redistributing’ forty of it. After all, he needed it, and it’s not a long jump to the conclusion that we actually owed him a lot more than that anyway, so he was being a prince by leaving us $20.

However, understand Chad’s point of view or not, he’s no longer welcome in this house, nor will he be in any house I ever live in. I am far from the most moral person in the world, but I don’t steal from people who invite me into their homes and who repose trust and confidence in me as a guest, regardless of whether I think they ‘owe’ me something or not. If Chad had wanted to mention his reasoning out loud and ask us if we could maybe pay him something for the work and the rotisserie grill, given that he’d just been laid off, I know Paul and I would have agreed… when we could afford it, which was not last week or this week, trust me. But at some point when we had some extra money, I’d have tossed him some of it.

All right, leave that aside for now, I was telling you about little stupid things that made today suck for me. In addition to not getting ANYthing in the mail, when I was expecting one thing for near-certain and hoping for a few other things that are supposed to be, at some point, wending their way through the postal labyrinth towards me, I had a shitty day at work. Well… not shitty, I guess, just… unpleasant.

First, we have a couple of new people who joined our class this week. To date, while there are many people in my class I don’t much like, I have to admit, they’ve all been very civil with me and each other, and I’ve been civil with them, and it’s one of the things that makes that job tolerable. Today, though, one of the new people went off on one of the girls who sits close to me… someone I think of as a nice person and, to the extent that one has such among co-workers one will never hang out with outside work, a friend. There was no reason for it; the girl in question is very pleasant and she didn’t say anything that merited the kind of response she got (which was basically this new woman snapping at her “Nobody was talking to you so you need to just mind your business, and that goes for all y’all down in the front row, too”).

So that sucked. I did go to our instructor and mention the incident, and the new bitch got moved to the other side of the classroom, and I’m sincerely hoping she pops off at someone again and gets fired, because there’s just no need for that kind of horseshit at any job.

That was one thing. Another thing is that for the past few workdays, we’ve been spending an hour a day doing ‘side by sides’, or ‘double jacking’, which means, we go out, pick somebody on the floor, and jack in to their phone box so we can listen to them take calls and, hopefully, learn from their experience.

Today… well, not to make too big a deal about it, but, well, the woman I was side by siding with clearly did not like having me there, and since our instructor encourages us to go back and do side by sides with the same people if we feel we’re learning from them, I asked her if she’d prefer I didn’t come back to her in the future. With an obviously fervent sigh of relief, she affirmed that she’d just love it if I never ever came back again, and then hastily added that it wasn’t me, she just didn’t like having anyone do side by sides with her, and when I was on the floor myself, I’d understand.

Look… I’m old enough, and ornery enough (you can use ‘wise’ in place of ornery if you like, but I’ll stick with my word, thanks), that I don’t let stuff like this get to me unduly. This woman doesn’t know me at all, and, frankly, my sincere belief is that if anyone out there interacts with me even slightly and then decides they don’t like my company, they are assholes and I don’t need them. That’s a subjective viewpoint and I understand that there’s certainly an element of defensiveness in there, but, nonetheless, I absolutely believe that this is true. I'm a great guy and a good friend and if anyone in the world doesn’t want to hang around with me, they simply suck. They’re unwise, and stupid, and obnoxious, and complete jerks, and it’s their loss, not mine.

Having said all that, being told by pretty much anyone that they’d prefer it if you never troubled them with your presence again is never exactly heartening. It's why I try to be very careful exactly who and when and why I do that (and my being very careful is why I put up with people like Dave Fiore and Mike Sawin on this blog as long as I did… I don’t want to hurt ANYone’s feelings and you have to push a lot of my buttons to get me to a point where I’m willing to).

Beyond all that (a phrase I use to the point of making it a cliché here, but, well, I can’t find a better one at the moment), every time I go out on that floor and double jack for an hour, I get horribly depressed. I can handle this job in terms of the actual job duties… I can be nice to customers even when they’re jerks and do my best to help them resolve whatever problem they have, because I am a nice guy and I like helping people when it doesn’t cost me much (or, in this case, actually makes me money). I might even be able to sell reasonably well, provided I don’t stress over it (my sales skills go in the toilet when quotas are being shoved down my throat and supervisors are glaring at me). And the job is very complex but I’m pretty bright, and a lot of the people in my training class and out on the floor aren’t very smart, so I’m not worried about that, either.

However, I am not emotionally cut out for all this corporate-hive conformist bullshit. I loathe being part of a team or a community. I do not like dress codes. I can’t stand being just another person in a row of cubicles, I hate having not even an illusion of privacy, I despise being referred to as a number, and I absolutely revile being constantly monitored and ‘coached’ when some sneaky little fuck decides I’m not doing my job right.

I won’t have any problem dealing with the customers, but I can’t stand the environment out there, with the fucking dress up days and the passing out balloons to people who get a sale within a certain time period and all that other faux Japanese morale enhancing horseshit that greedy American corporations use as a substitute for actually paying their employees a wage that bears some significant relationship to what their labor is actually worth to that corporation. And what I’m going to hate even worse than that is simply having to deal with all the goddam fucking corporate drones and shills I will be surrounded with at all times.

As an example of that, the worst thing that happened today was that we got another pep talk, this one from our Training Manager, a complete and utter dick with ears named Christopher something or other. He’s a peppy little fuck with a constant nervous tic of a smile, a face that looks like something produced by a cross between rabbit and rodent genes, and a smarmy rolling Old Testament style of hectoring his audience that makes you think he’d like nothing more than to have a pulpit to stand behind and a Bible he could pound it with. Unlike Ivan, who came in on our first day and tried to cram corporate fellowship and good cheer down our throats, this guy was the ultimate corporate shill. We WOULD love and enjoy and worship Sprint products, he told us, because we had agreed to that when we signed on with Accent. We would not think bad things about Sprint products, we were not entitled to, because we had taken this job and part of that job was to love and enjoy and worship and SELL Sprint products.

At one point, as this horrifying pencil necked zipper headed squirrelite was hopping around from foot to foot like a little kid needing to pee, testifying with fervor and zeal as to what was expected of us by that great holy dualogy, Sprint and Accent, he actually advised us that as customer service sales agents taking calls from irate customers, we would have to ‘be humble, and ask forgiveness’… and he said it with such a slick, unctuous delivery style that I could tell he just had to be a church deacon somewhere, and he was far more comfortable abjuring people about the loving joys of a personal relationship with Christ than he was berating them about their corporate responsibilities to be good drones. And, sure enough, next time I was on my computer, I looked up his little bio blurb on the company website and when he’s not shoving his head up someone’s ass at Accent and yammering like a chipmunk on crack about sales ethics and acceptable attitude, he’s training for triathlons or working with the youth at his church.

Fucker.

I know there are good people in management at Accent, and probably good people working the phones on the floor, but I so totally do not want to work for any corporation that pays a smarmy little dipshit like that to wield any position of authority over other people (especially me) at all. I could just look at him and tell that underneath the constantly spasmodic smile-rictus he kept zipping and unzipping his lips to display, he was a humorless petty vindictive little piece of crap who would never forgive or forget the most minor slight or sign of ‘bad attitude’.

Oh, today was a dress casual day, so I wore my Captain America shirt to work, and I could tell this guy didn’t like that at all… every time he looked at me I could almost hear him thinking to himself “Okay, it’s a casual dress day but I really don’t think people should be allowed to wear anything THAT unusual and distracting to a professional business environment.”

Cock hole.

If I could just go in there, sit in a corner with a some cubicle walls around me to give me even an illusion of my own space, and take calls without anyone fucking with me at all, I could do that job pretty well. But I’m going to have to be part of a ‘team’, to constantly show a ‘good attitude’, to participate and integrate and motivate and other annoying fucking things that end in ‘ate’, and that have little or nothing to do with my actual job performance.

I honestly don’t know how long I’m going to last there. I already can’t stand being on the floor, and I’m only there for an hour a day right now.

Well, enough of that shit. I’m being a downer here and there’s no reason for it… I’ve got a roof over my head, food in the cupboard, and a job to go to in the morning. Hopefully, whole barrages of stuff from various people will show up tomorrow in the mail, and I can forget what a lousy day I had today… although I swear to God, if I didn’t know that the only other job I can get hired to do in Zephyrhills was washing dishes, I’d quit Accent in a heartbeat.

Christ, I don’t belong there.