First Door on the Left

A story on tonight’s evening news caught my attention. It seems there are an estimated 50,000 convicted felons in this state who have completed their sentences and are not registered voters. Local politicians are courting their votes, trying to get them registered.

Yessiree, bubba, I was done elected by a bunch of criminals!

I always thought that once you were convicted of a felony you forfeited your right to vote, among others. Guess I was wrong.

Live and learn.

Have you tried Vanilla Coke yet? Do you like it? I’m still trying to decide.

Saturday Scruples

1. Your son’s Fifth Grade teacher is proud to be gay. He espouses gay family values in class. Do you protest to the principal?
You’re kidding, right? I think you already know the answer to this one. You should! I would be the first to nominate this teacher as “Teacher of the Year.”

2. As a joke, a co-worker sends anonymous love letters to another co-worker who takes them seriously. Everyone is enjoying the prank. Do you expose it?
Yes. I have never been a big fan of practical jokes, especially when they reach the point of cruelty.

3. Due to a mix-up the tax department fines you $500 for tax evasion. You’re completely innocent but it’ll cost $5000 to fight in court. Do you fight on principle?
I’ll fight, if you give me the five grand. Otherwise, I do not have $5000.

After a phone call to my regular doctor to convince him to send my records to the pain specialist to whom he had referred me, I was finally able to see the specialist at 3:00 this afternoon. He did nothing that could not have been done over the telephone, other than collect my $20.00 co-payment from me. I am scheduled to begin a series of corticosteroid injections next Friday morning. More injections will follow two weeks later, and then another series (if needed) two weeks after that. If the injections do not alleviate the pain, the next step is surgery to remove the pressure from the nerve.

I can’t help but feel positive about this. I keep telling myself that there is just one more week of pain, then it will be gone. I have to believe that.

I should start thinking about going to bed now. Even though tomorrow is technically one of my scheduled days off work, I do need to go in for a few hours to clean up some stuff I couldn’t get to during the week. It was not my fault these things get not get done. Had I had the resources available to me that I needed, they would have been done. Much needs to change.

Just home from work. There were two messages on my answering machine. Both from the specialist’s office with whom I am supposed to have appointment in the morning. The first one, left at 5:04 p.m., was to advise me that the appointment would have to be canceled because they had not received my records from my regular doctor. The second message, left at 5:08 p.m. by another person from the same office, was to remind me that I have an appointment at 10:00 in the morning.

Do I or do I not have an appointment with this doctor in the morning? Guess I’ll find out in the morning. Do the people in this office not communicate with one another?

In other news, I went to lunch with one of the managers from work today. This was not a manager from my department, though his department works closely with ours and does basically the same things. All he did the whole hour was complain about upper management and the lack of communication and support that exists within the company. He is doing all this complaining to a supervisor that has only been with the company about five weeks. Did he think I was going to be able to help him in some way? Was he, in his own way, trying to tell me that I had made a bad decision in accepting a position with this company? Whatever it was, it was very strange and I was very uncomfortable the entire time.

Thankfully I am off the next couple of days. Well, mostly. I have to go in for a few hours on Saturday to clean up a few things I was not able to get to during the week. Right now, I think it may be a good time for popcorn and TV. I’m feeling a bit stressed.

We have a bit of a dilemma at the office. Our clients, somewhat high end, are demanding excellent customer service. World class customer service. What we do is also rather technical, and demands somebody who knows their way around a computer.

Therein lies the dilemma. Good customer service kind of went out of vogue in the 90′s, so the people who grew up in that decade, though extremely computer savvy (being the internet generation and all), are not very skilled at customer service. People a bit older, who know good customer service, are not nearly as comfortable around a computer. How do we get the best of both worlds? We need to find people who know computers and also have great customer service skills. Easier said than done, it seems.

I have been in considerable pain all week, though nobody at the office knows it. I am very good at hiding it. This entire week has been pure hell. I have an appointment with the specialist on Friday morning. I am hoping he can put me out of my misery, one way or the other. I have to take at least three pain pills now to even get to sleep at night.

Speaking of, I need to go to bed. Hopefully to sleep for a few hours. Goodnight.

Spare a thought for the folks in central Texas today. They’ve been having a horrible time down there with floods, and predictions are that they will get another four to six inches of rain today. We’ll be on the edge of the storm, and one to two inches is predicted for here. We can use it. They don’t need it.

Then again, you know you can never predict the weather in this state. It is kind of cloudy outside right now, though.

Somebody told me a few years back that in order to even be considered middle class, you had to making your age in thousands of dollars per year. If that is the case, I am far from even middle class. I am beginning to believe that I will never see the day that I am not living from one pay check to the next. I take little comfort in the fact that I am not alone in this boat. In my youth, I spent a couple of years in South America. There, you were either rich or you were poor. I see this country heading in that direction.

Who knows? Maybe I’ll win the lottery some day. They tell me that in order to win, you have to play. Maybe I’ll start playing. Mathematically, your chances of being struck by lightening are greater that your chances of winning the lottery. Maybe I’ll be struck by lightening, then I wouldn’t have to worry about any of this stuff. A lot of maybes, huh? Maybe this company I’m with now will make it big, and, having gotten in on the ground floor, I’ll retire a rich man. There’s that maybe again.

Must go to work now.

Back when I was a kid, we called them tattle-tales.

Operation TIPS – the Terrorism Information and Prevention System – will be a nationwide program giving millions of American truckers, letter carriers, train conductors, ship captains, utility employees, and others a formal way to report suspicious terrorist activity. Operation TIPS, a project of the U.S. Department of Justice, will begin as a pilot program in 10 cities that will be selected.

You say you don’t like your neighbor, or the kid down the street that drives past your house at 2:00 every morning with the ghetto rap blasting out of his car speakers so loudly that it shakes your house? Now you’ll have a special toll free number you can call to turn them in. Oh, happy days!

What am I doing awake at this hour, you ask? My shoulder hurts. Ow. I’m going to have to do something about this one of these first days. Maybe the gov’mint has a number I can call.

WASHINGTON, July 14 — Three million American teenagers have thought seriously about or even attempted suicide, a government survey released on Sunday showed.

So what’s the deal with today’s teenagers? Do they have that little faith in their future? Or in themselves?

Then again, this was a government study.

I still haven’t decided whether or not I like my new job. Right now, I’m leaning more toward the not side. I’m hoping that changes. They hired me to make some changes, but I am encountering so much resistance. It’s becoming very tiresome, and exhausting.

I am going to go to bed now, and hope the pain pill I took a while ago kicks in soon. Tomorrow is another day.

I realize that most of you have it in your minds that today is Saturday, but it isn’t. Today is Sunday. I was off work yesterday and today, and start my work week tomorrow. All day today has been Sunday for me. Tomorrow is Monday. That’s the way it is. Get used to it.

If you were to search the world for the person least likely to live in Texas, you would find me. Yet I have lived here for going on three decades. I hate heat and I hate humidity. We have an abundance of both in Texas. We have two seasons here, summer and February. If it weren’t for air conditioning, I’d have been dead years ago.

I have done nothing on my days off that I did not absolutely have to do. It is too dang hot to venture outside. Stupid weather people made a big deal out of predicting thunderstorms for both yesterday and today, but they didn’t happen. As is usually the case, everybody all around us got the storms and we got nothing.

My shoulder and arm are hurting like a son of a gun today. No, that hasn’t been fixed yet. With the new job and all, there hasn’t been time to go see the specialist. I just keep taking pain pills, though even those are not helping much.

Okay, I’m through bitching now. You may return to your regular program. Thanks for listening.

Saturday Scruples

1. A disgruntled worker is brandishing an automatic weapon. You’re near a door. If you try to warn others you may not escape. Do you save yourself?
Sorry folks, but I’m out of there! Self preservation is a very strong instinct.

2. You’re buying a house from a sweet old lady. Her price is well below market value. Do you tell her?
No. (Like this is ever going to happen!)

3. Your five-year-old is angry and kicks you in the shins. Do you administer a sound spanking?
Again, no. But I would kick him back. Five is old enough to learn that actions have consequences.