There’s a new barista at Sbux. He’s a big giant flirty mcflirtsalot. I mean, I can’t quite blame him, as I am undeniably cute, but this guy is an abnormality because he’s really hot too. Like, boy band hot. Normally the hot guys don’t feel the need to compensate by laying on the Big Flirt. They just walk around and we should be pleased that they are gracing us with their hotness. Yesterday morning when he handed me my venti soy decaf latte, he goofed around and then made the window shut on his hand which was holding the cup. I mean, there’s a reason that Charlie Chaplin, Jack Black and Steve Martin chose comedy. Because they just couldn’t skirt by on looks alone. This guy is challenging everything I think I know about hot guys.
He’s actually starting to bug me. Like the Hobbit guy on American Idol, only not, you know, pathetic and somewhat repulsive.
I love irony. You know that, right? Irony is what delights me and keeps me thinking.
But man’ Fuck you, O.Henry. Stop messing with my life.
So, the riffings’
This morning, I skipped into work, perhaps a little perkier in my step because it is in fact Thursday and that means tomorrow is Friday and yay, weekend and unadulterated hours of sleep are to be mine! And also I could get some (fucking) laundry done, as yesterday I ended up dressing rather businesslike out of desperation and this morning, I decided to screw it and wore jeans and a grey DKNY t-shirt with my favorite red hoodie. Because life, she is good. And Thursdays, they are lovely.
After sitting at my desk for about fifteen minutes, slogging through the evening’s email, changing my voicemail message (because I get snarky reprimands from a certain Spoon if I do not), and opening all of the programs I use throughout the day, suddenly an email pops up. The entire department has a meeting. In the big conference room. In ten minutes.
Because I am stupid and clueless I didn’t even think anything about it. I just shrugged, rolled my eyes at how annoying it is to go to these meetings where they don’t tell us anything, just so that they can prove that they’ve been racking up the communication. Thus, we walk into the conference room and then realize’ something’s up. There’s the guy from HR sitting there in his polo shirt, Dockers and black tennis shoes. There’s the big VP. There’s my VP sitting there with a hang dog look on his face. Something’ something is not right.
Fifteen minutes later, I, along with thirty odd stunned people in pairs based upon geographical locations of cubicles, was escorted back to my desk, where a paper box was conveniently waiting for my personal belongings. And all I could think was ‘Man’ who was the box person? Who was out there dragging three dozen big copy paper boxes of death around the department?’
We were given ten minutes to get our stuff together. Under the careful eye of some nameless manager with a comb over from another department, I frantically popped into my email and forwarded all of my writing stuff and personal documents to my personal email account. Over the walls, the cubemates were in various stages of grief. Some people were pissed. I’m pretty sure that I heard the sounds of sniffles from one of the guys. The annoying one with the loud voice spent her ten minutes calling her (mother? Friend? Boyfriend?) and bitching about how she hates the company and they are a bunch of ungrateful assholes treating us like criminals, blargh bleargedy blargh, so that when we were getting ushered out, she still hadn’t wrangled up her Beanie Babies and was whining “My babies! My babies!” I’m certain others were quietly stuffing staplers, mouse pads and whatnot into their boxes too, since we really didn’t have enough supervision to go around. Honestly, I should have cleaned out my stuff when they first started whispering about this stuff, but I guess I believed them when they said that we’d have sixty days notice. What they apparently decided to do was pay us for those sixty days on top of whatever our severance package was.
I’m totally taking this on an up note. I mean, it couldn’t happen at a better time. I’ll have seven months, essentially, of full time pay, which is rather symbolic right there. Then I will have unemployment benefits, I think? Regardless, this will give me time to put together some kind of novel for the agents in New York, and maybe write some new stories and continue to submit stuff like mad to the little literary magazines and pay my dues and stuff. So that’s what I’m going to do. Really, given recent developments, I couldn’t have asked for better timing. It will be a little weird to be without a career, since I’ve had a job in one form or another since I was 19, but I guess I have to remind myself that I do have a job. A good wife and a better writer and, most of all, an excellent mommy.
