Friday 3 October 2014

October Blues (again)

     Hello, all!  Just so you know, I seem to have a lot of free time on my hands again, so I expect I will be finishing Mike's Eye sooner than later.  With that said, October has once again brought me misfortune.
     This year it started at 8 a.m., on the first of the month.  I had been called on September thirtieth, and was asked to show up the next morning to take a delivery down to Naperville, IL.  Being from Chicago, and never wanting to miss a chance to go back there, I of course said yes.  I was told I would be driving a cargo van, which made me happy because that meant that I could stop wherever I wanted for lunch.  Since I used to deliver in Naperville from 2000-2005, as part of my delivery route when I worked for TriComm BPI (office supplies company,) I knew where I wanted to get lunch.  A place in and around Chicago called Portillos.  I even knew what I wanted to get.
     So I showed up on Wednesday morning, feeling almost giddy from the thought of a Portillos cheeseburger with a side of their amazing cheese fries.  Only I never made it to Naperville, or Portillos (which has a Naperville location.)  Instead, I was told that the safety director wanted to see me for a minute.  Five minutes later, said director fired me.
     I did not see that coming, to say the least.  The reasoning was that I had twice "burned" the dispatchers.  The first time had been months earlier, when I turned down a run because I'd gotten just over three hours of sleep in a 48 hour period, and I simply was in no condition to be driving.  The second time was last Friday.  I'd made plans to see a movie long before I got the job.  Only I thought it was on a Saturday night, when instead it was on Friday.  I informed dispatch about this, with hours to spare before I was supposed to show up.  The dispatcher I talked to seemed non-pulsed by this, simply saying "Okay."
     I was a bit surprised when the safety director told me she was going to play the phone call back to me, from the previous week.  She played it through her computer, and not surprisingly the call went exactly as I remembered it, still concluding with the dispatcher's almost cheery "Okay."  It was immediately following the play back that I was fired.  So I said "bye", then got up and walked out.
     Those of you who have been following my blog for a long while may remember what happened in October, four years ago.  That time when I went down for corporate theft over a $3 box of latex-free gloves (which I was not actually stealing) at Gerber Collision and Glass.  That was the catalyst that landed me in Oshkosh, WI.
     As a double whammy, which is the way of my life, a couple hours later I decided to take a drive over to a local park.  Menominee Park is a great place, located on Lake Winnebago, in Oshkosh, that features a very nice walking path.  Most people use it for running, or biking, but I use it for walking because I can't do impact sports anymore, which rules out running, a thing I loved to do as a kid and as a teen.  Anyway, when I walked out to my car I discovered a giant puddle of coolant underneath the engine.  Turned out that the hose which allows coolant to flow into and out of the reservoir tank picked that day to develop a crack.  Luckily, the local VW stealership had a replacement on hand, and they didn't charge me an arm and a leg, just an arm.  Of course having to spend money you weren't expecting to, on the same day you just got fired, does not make for a warm fuzzy feeling.  
     Last year I was also on the job hunt throughout October, because the temp job I'd had was in limbo.  That allowed me the time to write Daemon Infiri, or as my blog readers will remember it, New Life.   So maybe this same time, one year later, I can finish the book I've been working on for many months now.  I do intend on finishing it, though as I've been writing it, new ideas and twists keep popping up, which has slowed my progress down as I work to redesign story progression, and work in new characters that I hadn't planned on at the beginning.
     I just hope it doesn't take as long to find another job as it has in the past.  I'm not particularly used to being fired.  It happened once, when I was in highschool back in the nineties, and again in 2010, and now once again in 2014.  The one thing that keeps going through my mind is who fires somebody on a Wednesday?!  Really, that is poor management practice.  Everybody knows that you fire people on Fridays, not Wednesdays.  Sheesh.
     In other news.....I've got no other official news.  I promise to keep you all posted on when my new book will be released.  Until the next time, don't forget to spend time with family and friends, enjoy a good laugh or two, enjoy some of your favorite food and beverages, listen to some good music, and take care of yourselves.  Peace out, y'all!